>There are reports on twitter that this is impacting X-rays, pagers as well as the phone system. This is ridiculous if true and suggests there have been some major failings when putting this infrastructure in place.
Take a look at that operating system and the UI from the article and tell me how that's unexpected.
And medical devices cannot just be modified after they are approved for medical use. Any changes must be introduced by the original vendor (or an approved 3rd party vendor) and put through a barrage of tests and certifications needed to release such a device for use on a human. Those include EMC/EMI testing, QC testing, safety testing, RF testing, clinical trials, regulatory compliance, etc.
When you buy a medical device running Windows 3.1, it will run that until it is thrown away or replaced.
Yes. NHS has a national level support agreement for XP.
There are a lot of legacy systems and it's not just the bother of replacing the system, there are a lot of front line staff who only know how to use specific applications and are not generally computer literate so moving them to new systems will slow everything down for weeks or months as they learn a new application.
Take a look at that operating system and the UI from the article and tell me how that's unexpected.