On 8^th March I followed others into the letters columns of the Surrey Advertiser with gratitude after bringing my wife home five days after major heart surgery (see under what the Press says)). The headline given to it was “NHS management needs to be best”.

I shared this with  My MP who just happens to be  the Secretary of State for Health,. He replied with “ Embracing technology could save more than £4 billion and deliver a more personalised service” but included “we are looking into how we would put patients’ medical records onto a central database that could be accessed from around the country.”

A good idea you might think but having watched medicine in action across several units recently and with a hospital file  almost too fat for a trolley I am qualified to understand why in September 2011 the Government pulled the plug on this “amazingly top heavy, hideously expensive programme” which didn’t deliver.

I seek to persuade him to lead not on centralism but already evolving digitalised connectivity, down the hospital corridor, between the hospital and health centre and so on, and then further afield.