I've worked in IT within the NHS for 10 years now....
....and have come across so much incompetence that I could probably flood this QOTW. However I'm lazy and crap at telling stories in text, so I won't.

I've never directly worked within a hospital but I have worked for an Ambulance service, and as part of that I've carried out PTS IT installations on hospital premises. This story isn't about incompetence, but about the baffling political correctness and the pink and fluffy HR madness that seemed to infect the NHS at Trust level in around 2004.
So in an act of NHS IT staff solidarity, I thought I'd post it here and share your pain.

We were taking over PTS roles from another Ambulance Service so we were rolling out our IT kit to the various hospitals in the county. Most places were a simple setup, we'd install an ISDN line and router into an office and some PC's and printers depending on the staffing levels.
At one particular site there was a main office of about six PTS staff, and a single person desk near the out-patients section of the hospital so that patients could sort out their transport needs as they left their appointments. The single desk was in a locked office with a shuttered front, almost like a small newspaper kiosk.

The member of staff that was to man this single PTS kiosk wasn't around while I was doing the setup of the IT so I did the install of the network kit and PC as normal with no input from the user. Job done, I returned to base.

The next week I got a call from our head of HR asking me to attend a meeting. I attended as asked and was told that the member of staff working on the kiosk had put a complaint in against IT because the mouse on the PC had been placed on the right hand side of the keyboard for a right handed user, and not on the left hand side for a left handed user (the user was left handed). As such, this was seen as descrimatory towards the left handed user.

I wasn't ever in any danger of being disciplined over the issue, but we had to then make our procedure for any new installation that we placed the mouse dead centre above the keyboard so that the user could choose the side they wanted, as opposed to the user just picking the bloody thing up and moving it from the right to the left.

I found out that the person making the complaint was a right pain in the arse and would moan about anything. But the fact that it was even raised as an issue, never mind a meeting with HR needing to take place, still irks me a bit.
( Evil Bastardo, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 17:04, 1 reply)

Blimey, that's just fucking ridiculous O_o
The woman I posted about a few below this one who works on the helpdesk at my last trust once assigned a call to me to replace a left-handed mouse with a right-handed one.

When I phoned the user I found that the buttons weren't reassigned or anything, it was purely a matter of picking up the mouse and placing it on the other side of the keyboard.

When the user said "Why couldn't the woman who answered the phone tell me that?" I was genuinely at a loss as to what I should say :D
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 18:40, closed)

It was ridiculous
But nothing in the NHS surprises me these days. Thankfully my days in this fine institution are numbered due to closure of the place I work.

I've met a few first liners that match the description of the woman you posted about. Especially some of the people we've had on contract over the years.
( Evil Bastardo, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 16:05, closed)