NO2ID: NHS record losses “predictable”
23 December 2007
For immediate release – 23/12/07
NO2ID: NHS record losses “predictable”
After dozens of Heath Service trusts admitted “losing” the most personal
information of tens of thousands of patients [1], Campaigning group
NO2ID [2], which has been critical of the NHS’s “Connecting for Health”
programme as a danger to medical confidentiality, said that this is a
predictable consequence of government policy. NO2ID urged more people to
withdraw their consent for their medical records to be uploaded to the
centralised “NHS Spine” database [3] and hospital doctors to fight the
bureaucratic drive to centralise all medical records.
Guy Herbert, NO2ID's General Secretary said:
”We are now starting to see the consequences of the Government obsession
with information 'sharing’ and centralised IT in the NHS. If you care
about your privacy then keep your medical records between you and your
doctor, and out of the hands of the Department of Health [4], if you can.
“If it were really designed to help patients and clinicians, Connecting
for Health would concentrate on creating secure methods of sending
medical information from place to place as is was needed, giving the
patient and the doctor control.[4] The technology exists. Instead it is
build round feeding the information you thought was confidential into
the Department of Health bureaucracy – the so called ‘secondary uses
system’ – and putting it at the disposal of NHS management.
“Medical understanding now stops hospital doctors from spreading disease
for bureaucratic convenience as they did in earlier centuries. They
wouldn’t let the Department of Health institute a needle-sharing
programme on grounds of 'efficiency'. They need to fight for data
hygiene too. Or worse is yet to come.’
-ENDS-
Notes for editors:
1) See, e.g. BBC News 23 Dec 2007: “Nine NHS trusts in England have
admitted losing patient records in a fresh case of wholesale data loss
by government services, it has emerged. Hundreds of thousands of adults
and children are thought to be affected by the breaches, which emerged
as part of a government-wide data security review.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7158019.stm
2) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the
database state. See
http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.php for a list of
‘database state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing.
3) The NHS Confidentiality Campaign (an affiliate of NO2ID) explains more:
http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org/?page_id=3
Its website includes a downloadable form letter you can send to your GP
insisting your records are not uploaded to the spine:
http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org/optoutletter
4) The Department of Health insists that it owns your most intimate
medical details. So, for example, the sensitive records held by sexual
health clinics and psychiatric units are to be centrally consolidated,
even where you are entitled to withhold them from your own GP.
See
The Guardian, 6 July 2006: “Patients, not the state, own medical
records, says GP”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/06/epublic.guardianweeklytechnologysection
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For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please
contact Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on
07956 544 308, or Michael Parker (Press Officer,
press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166. (Phil Booth is on holiday.)
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