NHS Trusts are spending £158,000 a day on new PCs

[Arthur]

Source: The Inquirer

 

NHS trusts are splashing £158,000 per day on new PCs and laptops at an average cost of £678 per device, a Freedom of Information (FoI) request has revealed.

 

The figures, obtained by memory and storage company Crucial, came from 197 of the 235 Trusts in England. Since the beginning of 2013, they have disposed of 219,232 computers - equivalent to around 120 each day - and spent over £260 million on 384,714 new machines.

 

Crucial said that it is possible that some of the computers are being disposed of by accident - they may have been mistakenly identified as having an unfixable problem, for example. Some may also simply be too old to operate properly, in which case upgrading is another way in which the NHS could save money and avoid electronic waste.

 

By doubling the installed memory of PCs, rather than buying new ones, Crucial estimates that the NHS could save £93 million.

 

A separate survey by the firm found that, despite the money spent, 42 percent of healthcare professionals still feel that IT is a hindrance in their jobs. More than a quarter said that they lack technology skills; 20 per cent did not know how to scan for viruses; and five per cent admitted to not knowing how to send an email.

 

[...]

 

The news follows last week's announcement that the NHS is to be granted £21 million to boost its cyber defences, after the wide-scale WannaCry infections earlier this year.

[DJ-1701]

Source: The Inquirer

 

Not surprising that Crucial, a business that would benefit from dedicated purchases of it's products, would be saying they could save money... when in all honesty I am sure the machines they are replacing are past it. I bet there was no independent view from a IT Tech on this.

[Arthur]

Not surprising that Crucial, a business that would benefit from dedicated purchases of its products, would be saying they could save money... when in all honesty I am sure the machines they are replacing are past it.

Yeah. It does appear that Crucial's FOI request was more of a marketing exercise than anything else.

 

If the PCs are really old there isn't any point in wasting money on brand new RAM (especially at current prices), although out of all of the 219,000+ PCs the NHS trusts got rid of in the last four years there must be some that would be perfectly usable with a few replacement parts / OS reinstall?

[southhamster]

I wonder how much NHS time and money was spent having to compile that information so that a commercial company can suggest that it can "help" by flogging RAM.

I agree that it can often be worth upgrading old kit: I do it all the time but there is a cost keeping older things going. Things like PSU fans and motherboard capacitors do fail more over time.

I sometimes find that just opening up an old machine seems to cause faults to appear!

[ellsandell]

There's a big problem with people demanding new computers because others have newer kit... Or because the new laptops are lighter etc. And at least in my experience older devices get both memory and SSD upgrades, dependant on the age of the device. (New devices are SSD as standard).

 

I think another factor is the time for staff not to have devices while they are being upgraded, so often it's more practical to replace devices outright (whether new or used). This then gives departments time to outfit a device if needed and redeploy.

[just_david]

There's a big problem with people demanding new computers because others have newer kit... Or because the new laptops are lighter etc. And at least in my experience older devices get both memory and SSD upgrades, dependant on the age of the device. (New devices are SSD as standard).

 

I think another factor is the time for staff not to have devices while they are being upgraded, so often it's more practical to replace devices outright (whether new or used). This then gives departments time to outfit a device if needed and redeploy.

 

+ with good planning when you buy you shouldn't need to upgrade anyway.

 

I'm not a fan of upgrading myself, putting brand new kit in something thats already getting to the end of its expected useful lifespan never seems like a good use of resources.

 

But this is blatent marketing speel by crucial - and I've seen a lot from them latley, I swear they did a similar article around schools too, and another based on ram for home machines basically saying everyone needs 8gb and should upgrade now

 

It wasn't bad advice per say, but it was very aggresivly written along the same, your IT guys incompetent line with some sudo science to back it up

[mavhc]

FOI requests being used for commercial gain, said it ain't so!

 

If you can bring your upgrades to the next computer then it's fine, eg ssds.

 

But I wouldn't want my treatment delayed because the computer used was full of ancient parts. For a company the size of NHS it's not going to worth it, just tracking individual PCs would be hard enough, let alone all the parts in them. Better to keep everyone on the same hardware and start fixing the software so they're not one massive wormable network.

[Arthur]

Better to keep everyone on the same hardware and start fixing the software so they're not one massive wormable network.

One advantage to buying brand new PCs with Kaby Lake/Ryzen CPUs is that it prevents the NHS from using ancient OSs like Windows 7.

[admars]

I remember when I worked at the NHS we bought some new PCs to replace some old ones, we contacted some of those charities that ship old computers to 3rd world countries, our equipment didn't meet their minimum spec, so was disposed of!

[davethetekkie]

The last few times I've been in our local hospitals I've seen very few NEW PCs in use... I've seen plenty of circa 2007-2008 Dell OptiPlex 760s and 745s though. What I see doesn't present the impression of an irresponsible NHS purchasing new systems just because. Maybe it's just the three trusts I've unfortunately had to spend time with making use of their services with my brood! At our place we pensioned off the last OptiPlex 745 2 years ago and the 755s and 760s were culled from back offices last year... And they were culled because they were crap. They'd had their day. The 745s were chock full of bad caps for a start; no amount of extra memory is going to fix an ailing mainboard!

[googlemad]

Can cost getting on for 4 figures for a new PC/laptop when you take into account things like licensing (Microsoft Office in particular), fancy keyboard with the reader for smart card etc.

 

I'm not involved in desktops too much but I know here we do try RAM upgrades etc but you can only do so much, and keeping on top of an estate of 3000 workstations sometimes it is actually easier to just swap a PC with a freshly imaged one from stock rather than faff about with temporary RAM upgrades and the like. As for hard drives I believe they just get physically crushed full stop when PCs are decommissioned.

 

A funny story when I first started here my PC was rubbish after sticking Windows 10 on it, 5 minutes later I had a shiny new one. i3 with SSD, apparently the batch of them weren't suitable for general hospital use as they don't have a built in speaker!

[localzuk]

Indeed, when you add it all up, that's a couple of hundred PCs a day. Considering the number of PCs total (probably about a million, going by employee numbers), I would say that they aren't spending enough! That's more than a 10 year replacement cycle!

[psydii]

A ten year life on a modern desktop doesn't actually sound that unreasonable for machine tasked with Office apps /data entry/retrieval.

 

I know of people who still get things done on 2008 white MacBooks, and some of my test Win10 laptops are 2007 vintage.

 

The form factor would matter a lot though, but that is what you are getting when paying £700 for a desktop rather than £350.

[mavhc]

Can cost getting on for 4 figures for a new PC/laptop when you take into account things like licensing (Microsoft Office in particular), fancy keyboard with the reader for smart card etc.

 

You should really be reusing the licencing and smart card readers though.

[PotNoodleTech]

£678 per device.

 

That's a very high "average" spec. Paying way over the odds for a high spec PC so that hopefully you do not have to upgrade it for 10 years is a false economy. They'd be better off spending £300 per device and seeing how it goes over the next 5 years, as long as it's an I3 and 256GB SSD I can't see any problems!!

[jmak]

Also depends how the figure is calculated - it may include installation and maintenance, maybe lease costs over 5 years. There will be a basic build, but I bet there's a lot of customisation for all of the different use case requirements in the health service. Licenses may not be straightforward to reuse if the replacement cycle is longer than the version life of a Windows edition.

[Lonix]

£678 per device.

That's a very high "average" spec. Paying way over the odds for a high spec PC so that hopefully you do not have to upgrade it for 10 years is a false economy. They'd be better off spending £300 per device and seeing how it goes over the next 5 years, as long as it's an I3 and 256GB SSD I can't see any problems!!

 

I was thinking that. Everytime I visit doctors and hospitals the majority of machines I see are average day to day users. Without more information though I can't be certain but I'd guess the majority of those machines were being used for internet/word. I know schools still purchase PCs for £500+ just to produce office documents and browse the interweb.

 

We have 6 year old PCs that are simple spec, they've lasted and when we get round to sticking SSDs in them they will feel like brand new machines. I think the OP pretty much sums up one of the negative issues with IT. They have all that money yet some how still had unpatched IT and Windows XP. Really is typical IT. Perhaps they purchased a bunch of iPads to sit gathering dust.

 

It's all typical mismanagement of IT in my view.

[psydii]

Don't forget to factor in the managed service charge for desktop replacement. A known proven stable platform is worth hundreds of pounds over a decade.

[nicholab]

I was in a hospital today the cost may be higher if you take into account the specialist screen constants have for viewing medical images. On a side note they also used Iron Mountain for document storage. Edited July 28, 2017 by nicholab

[mavhc]

You're going to be paying a bit more for a stable platform where the parts will be available for x years, with VPro etc