NHS website - how much?!

I don't know what the NHS website costs but given their IT expenditure is in the multi-billions you would expect it's a lot. Maybe it's actually minimal. I don't know if this has bothered the Public Accounts Committee.

What I do know is that it appears to not contain any information about medical/doctor's certificates - those things which come in various flavours and require a visit to the GP. Definitely not 'a page' which contains 'the official info'.

Here's what happens when you type in 'certificates'.



Nowt of any use to anyone.

Actually another thing that happens is that a list of suggestions pop-up which are all about types of illness - obviously the site is geared around 'prevention'. This is pretty damn obvious from the homepage as well, as it yells 'FIVE A DAY MEALS ' at you.

The actual reason I was looking for 'certificates' was to provide information to people who needed to know something about the different types of them and what they meant. Y'know 'joined up government', 'do it online' and all that.

Plus it was people who were online anyway - looking at something I was attempting to link from - and in the particular case probably hadn't much clue about the way the system works. So, yes, talking to someone like a GP would help them but aren't we supposed to be saving government's money by doing more of the info provision online?

A fair bit of what the rest of government does is linked in some way to 'health'. Is this a case of dem silos? I would note that in my egov networking NHS people seem to be strangely absent ...

Postscript: turns out that info on medical certificates is on the DVLA website. Makes sense? Not.