I wonder if part of this is because they want to use NHS numbers for children in schools as a consistant identifier. I wouldn't be shocked if that was part of the reasoning.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
18 points (90.9% liked)
UK Politics
3513 readers
84 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Wes Streeting yet again jumping at the chance to make trans people's lives worse. Honestly don't think 'Tory-lite' does him justice anymore.
Some context to who wrote this "damning independent review":
The biased nature of this review was already clear. Not just from the leading questions used by the survey which presuppose that gender diversity and those researchers engaged in work to understand it are part of a sinister plot to silence and abuse ‘gender critical feminists’. But also from the way that Sullivan was commissioned by Michelle Donelan, then Conservative Secretary of State for DSIT, who then refused to answer any basic questions about the review’s ethics application.
The most clear sign of bias however is the choice of lead author. Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn. There is no evidence of the involvement of any trans person in the conducting of this analysis.
I thought the argument here was that biological sex and gender should be recorded as separate fields on NHS records because currently it is inconsistently used leading to clinical risk. The NHS number is not an identity document, it's meant to track your records over your lifetime of treatment in the NHS.
Terf island strikes again. What a bunch of miserable cunts.
Surely your actual "record" shouldn't change but the gender property on that record? As such you can change your gender (or name etc) as much as you want and your record is unaffected. From a book keeping / data management point of view that makes sense.
I suspect the real reason is that the NHS has a pretty shit record keeping system such that issuing new NHS numbers makes all that worse. I dunno, would you get a new NHS record if you changed your name? From a record keeping perspective isn't this the same?
I suspect the real reason is that the NHS has a pretty shit record keeping system
Yep honestly in genral this is true.
But gender historically has not been a field expected to change. This is an easy fix when such medical information has no relevant on the use of the data. IE pretty much every other database used.
But when you make a change where historical data needs to be kept. The age and design of such systems makes the changes much more complex and expensive.
As a retired legacy systems software engineer. Where updating old database structures and all the systems related to them was my job for 20+ years.
This would involve hunting down old and badly documented systems all over the nation.
It is the need to address what would have been implemented as a fixed variable never expected to change. But also used to decide on many medical pathways. Even more so over the last 30 years as the medical industory has been correcting male dominated research bias on treatment pathways.
And having to find every instance connected to it and ensure it can handle something that is now a data type with a historical status.
Unfortunatly developers have historically implemented code with the expected prejudices society embodies. We were after all only human so did stupid human things with out knowing the potential harm.
Oh so that's what they need AI for...
LOL. AIs help will would be significant, but not adequate on its own. It's just not at that level yet. I did this for Y2k in the financial industry and worked for the US medical industry in the early 2000s doing similar legacy migration.
The issue is distribution of solutions. The NHS has 50 years of random IT roll-outs, handling in very different ways with little unification. The system would need a huge change to unify the data formats and sharing policies. This on its own would take years to manage over such a large organisation that basically cant do the shut a system down and see what breaks diagnosis used by many to investigate old servers long since forgotten.
It's doable. AI will help staff do it faster. But it will still miss a lot, and live testing is way more dangerous than would ever be expected.
The best approach in my opinion would not only be to re-write everything and roll out a whole new system within every NHS and linked system. With a collection of APIs allowing all the old data types and interfaces used to link to that system. Then spend a year or 3 running them in parallel with staff using the old system. Using AI and skilled developers to hunt for and fix areas where data fails to get added/updated to the system as expected. Then slowly start moving staff over to the new system.
But its also the most expensive option and does little to address the human problem in such situations. IE basically risking repeating the London ambulance service IT roll out like issues.
Your NHS record has a gender marker that the system doesn't allow to be changed, so you need a completely new record (and number) to have it changed.
That sounds like a programming limitation that should be amended then, rather than requiring the re-issue of a new number just because somebody can’t be arsed to write the code to allow it to be changed.
The NHS systems are so antiquated at this point. They really need a complete re-write to be fit for purpose.
It should be changed, but it's worked like this for ages now and I doubt Streeting will push for this..
Exactly, sounds like they're making a mountain out of a stupidly simple record keeping change. Fucking idiots.
I don’t think it’s that simple. The three hospitals closest to us belong to two different trusts and use different systems, the GPs are free to chose their own systems and our GPs doesn’t play well with the local pharmacies systems that are also different….
From an IT viewpoint it’s probably easier to create a new patient record.
Oh I don't disagree with you. But creating a new record to consolidate several different ones is what you're describing. I'm saying when there should only be one you should just flip a bit on that record.
But this is typical NHS IT shit show. Why the fuck are they different systems in 2025? Why are we duplicating work with zero interoperability?
Because the last attempt to unify NHS systems into one central system (The National Program for IT aka NPfIT) turned into a typical mega-budget IT project that got nowhere?
What we should be prioritising is data interoperability standards that solutions can be qualified against so things work smoothly. Not giving one of the big contractors a frame contract that locks the whole NHS into a single provider for the next 20 years.
Agree, but yet we don't even have that. It's so backwards. I'd have a better chance if I asked my medical records to be faxed to me and I then posted them to my GP. And I don't even own a fax machine!