The NHS was deliberately underfunded by the CONservative government of the last 14 years to encourage us all to go private. When talking about money for the NHS they always said that they were spending more on health than ever before. This being a trick that allowed them to give our tax money to private health companies. From the NHS's point of view, they are a very lean organisation that had no money to spend updating various IT systems over the last 12 years, so didn't.