Andrew Lansley says telehealth will transform NHS

Steve Hards

Pity the poor civil servant tasked with writing a speech for the Secretary of State for Health to deliver at the HC2011 informatics conference in Birmingham on Tuesday. Somehow you have to say something positive about health AND relate it to the Government’s attempts to boost broadband infrastructure developments. So you fall back on perpetuating the myth that telehealth requires high speed internet and the press licks it up, as demonstrated by this Guardian article: Andrew Lansley says telehealth will transform NHS. In the meantime, Telehealth Solutions puts its own spin on the speech in its press release, implying that Lansley was endorsing its ‘HomePod’. Where’s Tunstall’s take on this? Their PR team have been a bit slow off the mark, methinks. Or perhaps they are wise to hold off – do you really want to be endorsed by a Minister whose boss has to step in to try and give him a lesson in how to defend an indefensible, pig’s ear of a policy on NHS ‘reform’?