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In answer to Anonymous,
I would much rather have the cause of my illness treated and cured than have a doctor be nice to me and leave me in pain.
Personally my soul feels much better when my body is not ill. So when I am ill I like to be diagnosed and cured as quickly as possible.
In the engineering world misdiagnosis is not a luxury we can afford. And in many cases we have to diagnose not only the equipment but the human user also. Either machine or human could be the cause of the problem and engineers need to have people skills these days.
The advantages of taking the engineering approach would be as follows.

1) Engineers do not suffer from information overload in fact they lap it up, they are information geeks and they need all the information they can get, the more information the better. I have never had a problem where I was given too much information. Not so with doctors, 2 or 3 symptoms seem to be their limit!
2) Engineers are not techno phobic in fact I used to work with two desk top computers or more at a time if I could get my hands on them and so did my colleagues.
3) Engineers are not fazed by diagnostic equipment and learn new skills very quickly indeed.
4) Engineers look for the cause of the problem whereas NHS doctors generally treat the symptoms. If you find the cause of the problem no matter how strange that cause may be, the problem can be treated and cured.
5) Engineers are open minded; they have to be in a zero tolerance commercial environment. Every problem has to be fixed no matter how complex and the time restraint is usually no more than a day at most. Zero tolerance to misdiagnosis works! If you get it wrong money is lost and your boss will not be pleased not to mention what the customer might say about the matter. Get it wrong twice and your present employment will cease very quickly. For instance how would you feel if your bank's computers crashed and no one could get them to work again? Supposing you rang your bank and they told you that no one could have their wages because the computer had an "Unknown Fault". You would soon change your bank.

Correct diagnosis is the very first step to treating all health problems. Get this right and huge amounts of public money can be saved. The NHS approach of "Try this", "Try that", "Try something else" is a money waster. And treating the symptoms never cured anyone.

Getting the right diagnostic system in place and learning from the commercial engineering world could save the NHS bundles of money and make the UK population much healthier.

In fact if the NHS does not change along these lines then I suspect that there will not even be an NHS in the near future and that would be sad.