Woke up this morning to news of the Government’s dismantling of the NHS IT programme.

Is it me or does it feel like this policy has been dismantled more times than a tower of toy bricks on a nursery floor?

Nicholas Timmins commented in his FT blog today that it isn’t really a dismantling and more of a spoiler ahead of the Labour Party Conference next week.

Anyway, the Government has got rid of the Board overseeing it and is going to let NHS organisations secure local solutions to IT. This can only be a good thing for all those high street computer repair shops that have sprung up in recent years, their windows festooned with old computer parts last seen in Back to the Future.

Some things remain though (perhaps someone loaded them on a memory stick at the last minute) and I was pleased to see from a reearch standpoint that the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) is one of them. It provides a vital, central source of data about the NHS for research.

I’m off to re-boot for the evening.