By Richard Craven, Vice-president and Managing Director, EMEA for Caradigm.
Influential politicians continue to voice very strong criticism over the cost of the National Programme for IT; but a greater concern is that the health service still does not have the information systems it needs to help clinicians improve healthcare and deliver an affordable healthcare economy in the future.

By Val Dimmock, simulation and clinical skills facilitator at Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
The key to delivering safe, high quality care is a knowledgeable, competent and confident workforce, yet the Francis Report shows that the NHS is struggling to ensure that staff develop and maintain the necessary skills. Val Dimmock, simulation and clinical skills facilitator at Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, says clinical skills leads must adopt a new approach to training, supported by innovative online learning tools.

By Tim Dunn, General Manager, FairWarning.
The government has finally published its long-awaited response to the Caldicott2 review of information sharing in the NHS - and, as many of us had hoped, has accepted all of its recommendations. It's a landmark moment that could see the NHS turn an important corner and stride progressively towards building transformational models of care.

By Tim Hawkins, Managing Director of Clinical Solutions at Elsevier.
The call to create a "paperless NHS" by 2018 aims to deliver improvements in patient safety, experiences of patients and health care professionals, as well as delivering high quality care and increase efficiency. The focus so far has, largely, been on digitising patient records, especially with the launch of the £260 million "Safer Wards, Safer Hospitals" Technology Fund, which will provide match funding for NHS providers in England to support the move away from paper-based systems.

By Wayne Sime, Director of Library Services at the Royal Society of Medicine.
When I joined the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) in 2006, a year before the Kindle was invented and four years before the iPad dominated the tablet market, the RSM's library was a very different place.

By Devin Chawda, Co-founder and CEO of Y-cam Solutions Ltd.
Home carers and independent care homes are often criticised for providing inadequate standards of care to the elderly and vulnerable. This is a clear cause of concern for those who are planning to use care services for a relative or friend.

By Wayne Parslow, VP Harris Healthcare EMEA.
A new and frenzied debate has opened up in the world of healthcare technology- should NHS technology be open source? A move to open source would potentially mean vast reductions in licence fees for the NHS, the ability for the NHS to develop systems to their bespoke needs, no more supplier lock-in - which results in NHS organisations struggling to get the IT products they use to work with another supplier's - and of course, no need for "one size fits" all contracts such as we saw with the National Programme for IT.