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Mark, when Trusts and people like yourself start treating Information and IT services with respect and listening to what they say you might start getting somewhere.

Too many times I've seen senior directors ask for something to be told "no problem, but it will cost £x" and then go to a board meeting and say IT can't do it “it’s too difficult” or “too complicated”.

CIDS is a prime example of this, it's a massive piece of work for Community Services and yet when you look at the dataset it does not provide any granular activity detail (i.e. READ, IDC10, SNOMED, etc) which would help with some of the data requirements you list.

Trusts are frantically trying to get compliance with this requirement from Monitor and some big procurements are taking place on the back of this.

Once the data is published however, people like yourself will say "why wasn't this level of detail included?" and blame IT/Information for it. Don't worry though, I'm sure someone can write an app for an iphone over a weekend that will resolve the problem.

To be fair to the NHS Information Centre, they've had CIDS thrust on them too, as politicians obviously desperate to show a difference before the next election are pushing hard for this data collection without thinking their requirements through.

In this, history is repeating itself too, as the same thing that happened with NPfIT whereby the contracts were so loosely written initially to get them tendered before the election that the likes of CSC/BT are now practically impossible to remove because they can say they delivered against these loose requirements - and the subsequent tangle of Additional Service Requests issued to try and fix them.

In regards to your IG suggestion too and again linking this to my point about the relationship between an organisation and it's IT/Information team - I've seen an IT person lose their job because a nurse lost a laptop with patient information on it - the nurse in the meantime got away with a warning.

I'm hopeful that once Clinical Chief Information Officers are appointed it might be possibe to start to re-dress this balance.