There is something intensely irritating about trying to find information from the NHS. There’s firstly the endless, pointless and costly re-branding. Where you aware that the NHS had now become ‘NHS Choices’? Me neither. It would be really good if we could chose to have a public run NHS rather than one in which the private sector increasingly makes huge profits from. Oh, and don’t lets get started on bugs in the NHS. David Craig claims in his new book ‘Squandered’ that as many as 40,000 people could have died in dirty hospitals as a result of bugs - most of which could have been prevented simply by keeping the places clean. People who I know have worked in hospitals have anecdotally collaborated this by saying that being killed by some viscious and preventable bug would not be recorded on the death certificate and therefore the true horror is never revealed.

Anyway; rant over for the morning. Unless we want to start bashing the keyboard about the re-branding; is it a hospital? No, it’s a trust, or a university trust. Does anyone know what this means? As for trying to find health information, millions of pounds could be saved on the endlessly useless local health websites (go on, try and find something for yourself in your local area) by simply building 2 web pages; yes, that’s right, just 2.  On page one it could say - ‘pain in the butt?’ phone your doctor. And page 2 could say ‘really bad pain in the butt?’ Go to hospital (if you can find out where it is and it still has an A&E department - AND if you’re not terrified of going in for something minor and then getting struck down by something really hideous and fatal).

So it’s no surprise at all today when I went (via the ICO website) to follow a link that I thought might have the answer to a question I’ve tried to answer for around six months now to do with data sharing agreements. The link I went to…doesn’t exist any more because the NHS Information Authority ‘has now closed’.

And on the ground level? Well a recent trip to the doctor revealed that the previous doctor I’d seen had LIED - yes, that’s right - not just made a little mistake - but put a really wrong piece of information on my medical notes.

Ah, Tony Blair, what must it be like to have done so much damage to the health service and managed to line the pockets of the US medical business and line your own pockets at the same time.

Sometimes I really think it’s not an information revolution that’s needed but a real one…