I'm 100% behind an NHS database and therefore support what you do, as I said in Tom's earlier post about this, given my reasons why. It's a tough call to choose where the finite money goes and I certainly don't envy the decision makers. Misguided populist view will say: why spend money on computers when the money should be spent on paying staff better, expensive drugs, treatments, new beds etc. But I believe that along with new drugs, new treatments and therapies, an NHS database is also a medical advance and can help these other areas: treatments can be more targetted to a patient's unique makeup, lightning fast decisions can be made with large amounts of data in emergencies, medical research can be helped. It's about time we had some more cross-party consensus politics, that we have already seen in the banking system, moving into healthcare. If the roll-out of a database can be immune from the goal-post moving of short-termist political manifesto targets then we can move on to a serious issue being that the NHS staff have a deep mistrust of such a database system, with valid concerns I agree. In blog posts here, I see people say the system is horrendously insecure. So they are not saying that any system will always be insecure - just that the way this one is being made will result in it being secure. So they have a notion in their mind that there can be a secure system. That computer systems can be secure. Going back to the anecdotal evidence seen here in replies to the blog posts, which suggests NHS staff mistrusting the system. If the issues can be addresses, then the staff need to be able to own the system, make it theirs and see it as another valuable medical resource. They need to be aware of what it should do and what it should not do. Much the same as saying that giving someone medical drugs is not always the best treatment. Or we can all just carry on moaning about it and not do anything about it. The conundrum for our Tom is that if you're a regular reader you'll remember him expressing an interest in working more with computers having excelled at them during his formative years. So Tom, perhaps you are the one to influence the roll out of the NHS system with your hands on healthcare knowledge coupled with your enthusiasm for computing?