Alex, there is a lot of truth in what you say. I used to work in a hospital which had an in-house written database. The person that wrote it left and nobody had a clue what was going on, did they learn any lessons? No, they just allocated somebody to write a new one in Access!!! My advice would be to invest in a commercially available software like EMAT, HECS, SEMS or OPTIM where you can enter into a SLA with the supplier.
Also from experience supporting an in-house database is very labour intensive.
