NHS Digital Rollout Failure Highlights How Bad Processes Survive Digitisation

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A former NHS employee recounts how their team's transition from paper-based workflows to a new digital system failed to fix underlying process problems, simply replicating existing inefficiencies on screen. The author draws a parallel to a core software engineering principle: digitising a flawed process produces a flawed digital process, much like porting legacy code without revisiting its design. A key concern was that the deployed system was an undocumented, US-imported tool with no training, no known owner, and no integration guidance — conditions that would halt any standard software review. The author argues that in public-sector software, policy acts as the specification and code as its implementation, meaning gaps between the two directly affect real users. The piece calls for applying the same standards of documentation, accountability, and iterative feedback that engineers demand in codebases to the deployment of government and institutional systems.

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