Will this mean chronic suffers will get tattoos?

In a creepily named report today, Coding for Success: Simple technology for safer patient care the NHS has called for patients to be barcoded.

The Health Minister Lord Hunt is rexcomending a system named GS1, a global standard sponsored by Kewill and GXS.
Interstingly I find this,

Barbara Moorhouse was recruited as director general of finance for the Department for Constitutional Affairs, with responsibility for the department’s £3.3bn budget. Moorhouse is another example of a classic move by government to poach from the private sector. She took up her first group finance director role in 1997 when she was chief finance officer for technology company Kewill Systems.

Now I am not suggesting that there are any links between the two things, oh alright I am.

I just cannot understand, when we know how bad the Government and public sector is at great IT projects and databases they think we need another one.

Another thing I note that there is, as always an EU angle to this as the document makes clear (p.30), in which this project in the UK seems to part of a bigger EU project,

"The Pharma Traceability Pilot, part of an EU initiative called BRIDGE (Building Radio Frequency Identification solutions for the Global Environment), is looking at the potential of radio frequency identification in a variety of applications".

This is all part of Commissioner Reding's much vaunted 'internet of things' and is run by the same GS1 organisation that Lord Hunt wants to run the NHS proposal.

Now when was the last time you heard someone say,
"Well, it's a free country innit?"