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Heya

The art of successful politics, look you see, is to create the illusion of making a maximum impact overtly – to be seen to have done something – whilst covertly in real terms actually doing as little as possible. Quite often the latter aspect can in fact have consequences of a decidedly negative nature.

We, as a civilisation or society, are hardly short of examples of this. One such instance is the decision by our present government, who all agree have been a spectacular success with nearly all they have done of late, informing the NHS that it, as an organisation, will soon be banned from the “absurd” practice of using fax machines.

Ha ha ha, indeed. In this technological juggernaut of an era, this made for splendid headlines. On a day to day basis, after all, hardly anyone uses a fax anymore. Never mind that; few even use the landline telephone network which allows a fax to do its thing. Yes, of course the NHS – like everyone else – should get rid of fax machines would be the immediate reaction of most. But, should they?

As a frame of reference, let us make no mistake. The NHS is in perpetual trouble, with reports of it being “on the verge of collapse” being a constant for the last 2, maybe 3 decades. Money must be saved, more money must be spent on it so as to save it.

In terms of money must be spent, perhaps rather the existing money should be spent better. Simply throwing money at something does not make it better. Take, for a comparative example, your average footballer. A good example, methinks, for certain aspects of the fourth estate love nothing more in complaining how much footballers earn in comparison to doctors, nurses and so forth. We are often treated to stories of how one footballer or another is thrown an extra 50,000 or so a week. I have yet to see the instance where throwing more money at a player has improved that player, or made them better. As in, if some club currently paying me zero came along and paid me 100 or so a week to play, I assure you that my skills would not magically increase.

Yes, I will get to the fax business in a moment, but I seem to be on a rather rich vein of rambling here. Money must indeed be “saved”, and there are immediate ways of doing this. The fact that the government is determined everyone must live longer, up to 100 on average (probably) kind of says as a given that a lot more people are going to need a lot more medical attention than they did 40 or so years ago. Also, this “nanny state” business. Why not allow people to self-medicate? Should you go to a chemist and request anything more explicit or hardcore than some headache tablets, one gets bombarded with threats from pharmacy staff, insisting that the patient – perhaps suffering nothing more substantial than a momentarily sore arse – go and see a doctor. And they wonder why our doctors offices are so solidly booked.

So, anyway, fax machines. One must assume, or presume, that the idea of placing a blanket ban on fax machines across the NHS is motivated by those precious terms “cost cutting” and “money saving”. Surely sending an email is cheaper, faster and more efficient? Perhaps. Yes, in certain aspects. But there are certain key advantages to using a fax machine that one does not get with emails or similar forms of electronic communication.

Here is a by no means exhaustive but nonetheless hopefully compelling list of things to consider with this ingenious decision to rid the NHS of the fax machine.

* a fax cannot “accidentally” be sent to several (million) people at once, unless one resends it the fax will only go to the number dialled or typed in.

* spam filters and junk mail detectors do not exist on fax machines, so no fax of importance is inadvertently deleted by the settings.

* you cannot shove thousands of faxes onto a quite small memory stick and smuggle them off somewhere, or at least not with the ease that you can do that with emails. Just ask that Ed Snowden fellow, or that weird looking Ecuadorian chap behind that WikiLeaks web thing.

* a fax being sent and received relies solely on the relatively (strong and) stable landline network. It does not depend on a network provider, their data transfer rate or if their services are currently available.

* whilst you can send obscene pictures via a fax (Spiros and I were champions of this, once), one cannot really attach malicious viruses or “malware” to a fax. Nothing for someone to inadvertently click on then, which means nothing to bring communication and systems to a standstill.

When it comes to important, medical and quite likely life or death stuff, looking at the above I really have no problem whatsoever with the NHS, doctors and chemists et al, carrying on using fax machines. Carry on using them until the end of the world, really. By all means integrate “new” technology and all that, but surely I am not alone in thinking that a service of such importance would be “absurd” to completely abandon a safe, secure and reliable form of correspondence?

This may well come as a surprise, or maybe not. It is not just the NHS that makes use of the fax machine in this day and age. Several banks and such financial institutions will still correspond only via fax for high level matters. The reasons for this are right there in the above points I made.

So, then. By “banning” the NHS from using faxes, some Health Secretary or Minister or other such rubbish has been able to look as though they have “introduced” new technology to the organisation, and indeed created the impression that they’ve made formidable financial savings. Let us hope then, that by the time the ban on faxes comes in, the NHS computer network has a smooth running email system, one that is attended to and monitored and is, of course, immune to viruses, network errors, operating system crashes, etc.

Or, you know, maybe it's just me that thinks about stuff like this. Perhaps, arguably, too much, maybe.



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