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Australian State Govt. To Fund iPads For Doctors

angry tapir writes "The current premier of the Australian state of Victoria, John Brumby, has promised every doctor in Victoria's public hospital system would be issued with an Apple iPad if his incumbent Labor Government was returned to power in the state's upcoming election."

4 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Response to genuine need or political pandering? by siddesu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    his party was committed to giving doctors the tools they needed to provide the best care to Victorian patients.

    Having done a few projects with medical institutions of various sizes, my impression is that there are quite a lot of stringent and rather divergent requirements for "tools they need to provide the best care" depending on the specialty, in addition to a ton of general and institution-specific requirements regarding, between others, payments, data security and privacy.

    Giving everyone an iPad doesn't strike me like a policy implementation in response to a specific need, but rather as trying to win an influential group with shiny presents.

    Are the doctors going to bite on such a small bait?

  2. Governments shouldn't buy a product by anti-NAT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They should specify standards that multiple competing products can comply with. How can anybody but Apple win this under a competitive tender?

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    The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
  3. Kavka's toxin puzzle by Phoe6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Reminds me of Kavka's toxin puzzle. ...the Political Manifesto. Before an election, a political party will release a written document outlining their policies and plans should they win office. Many of these promises may be difficult or impossible to implement in practice. Having won, the party is not obligated to follow the manifesto even if they would have lost without it.

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    Senthil
  4. Re:A non story by cloricus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Like the quality of your post, the opposition in the state and federal parliaments is a waste of time. If Baillieu was any good he'd win this election hands down over the horrific failure by the Brumby government regarding the bush fires. Instead we get yet another Liberal scare campaign, when they could be getting down to real issues.

    My reference to reckless spending is regarding the Myki system which cost a billion dollars, and counting, to replace a system that wasn't broken. Worse still, the Metcard system it replaced is still required and the public transport network is still unreliable!

    If you consider a billion dollars in context: We could have just had free public transport for 1-3 years without a single ticket instead of this failure. That's based on back of a napkin maths but a billion dollars buys a lot of zone 1 dailies. And it's not the only waste I can point to.

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    I ate your fish.