I was just browsing the NHS Data Model ....

I was having a look through the NHS Data Model today and
came across the PERSON class. Some expected attributes like person identifier, national insurance number and person birth date but was surprised to discover that the NHS has provision to store your DVLA driver number, passport number, pupil number, Inland revenue tax reference number and perhaps best of all Customs & Excise value added tax number. Why does the NHS need all this data? It reads more like an identity record than a hospital patient.

And looking at relationships for PERSON we discover that "a Person must be the owner of one or more PERSON ORGAN". Hmmm, if it's only one then which one?

The model appears to be very hard wired with a maximum number of relations stated. For instance it seems that multiple births can only have one location. So what happens when the first child was delivered in the taxi to the hospital! Obviously, the designers didn't take my database course. :-)

I also came across a classic case of inflexibility/source of error with some of the coding schemes, such as
COMMISSIONING SERIAL NUMBER "From 01/04/2005 an '=' (equals) as the last significant character in this six character field will indicate an episode that should be excluded from the Payment by Results tariff. The position of the last character depends on any preceding characters eg 1st character if field is otherwise blank, 4th character if following 'OAT', up to a maximum of 6th position."
I thought this practice went out with Cobol 66!