Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
The NHS wants to share patient information on a huge database. Has government learned nothing from the privacy debate?
A few days ago, I dropped into my GP's surgery to pick up a prescription and was confronted by one of those large, floor-mounted pop-up displays that one finds in exhibitions, trade fairs and circuses. It informed me of an exciting new scheme by which the "quality of care and health services" would be "improved" by "sharing" information about the care I receive with those who plan health and social care services, as well as with "approved researchers and organisations outside the NHS".
The mechanism by which this "sharing" was to be accomplished, namely uploading one's confidential medical records to a huge database, was nowhere mentioned in the poster. Indeed, the word "database" appears nowhere either in the poster or in the official leaflet that is being junk-mailed to every household in the land. Instead, there is a lot of soothing verbiage extolling the benefits of uploading all our medical records to a giant server farm. Doing so will, for example, enable the NHS to "find more effective ways of preventing, treating and managing illnesses", "guide decisions about how to manage NHS resources so that they can best support the treatment and care of all patients", etc.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/26/health-secrets-not-safe-with-gp
A few days ago, I dropped into my GP's surgery to pick up a prescription and was confronted by one of those large, floor-mounted pop-up displays that one finds in exhibitions, trade fairs and circuses. It informed me of an exciting new scheme by which the "quality of care and health services" would be "improved" by "sharing" information about the care I receive with those who plan health and social care services, as well as with "approved researchers and organisations outside the NHS".
The mechanism by which this "sharing" was to be accomplished, namely uploading one's confidential medical records to a huge database, was nowhere mentioned in the poster. Indeed, the word "database" appears nowhere either in the poster or in the official leaflet that is being junk-mailed to every household in the land. Instead, there is a lot of soothing verbiage extolling the benefits of uploading all our medical records to a giant server farm. Doing so will, for example, enable the NHS to "find more effective ways of preventing, treating and managing illnesses", "guide decisions about how to manage NHS resources so that they can best support the treatment and care of all patients", etc.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/26/health-secrets-not-safe-with-gp
