NHS England has some sneaky plans for Care.data acceleration Despite promises to pause the hated Care.data scheme, El Reg has discovered that the architect of the plans, NHS England's National Director for Patients and Information Tim Kelsey, plans to gear up the pilot programme before the next election. Labour MP Roger Godsiff told El Reg that Kelsey had informed him of the plans to " …
May be your life.
"In January El Reg revealed that hundreds of thousands of NHS patients who opted out of having their details shared with private companies under the controversial Care.data scheme would not be invited to a number of cancer-related screenings."
Did I miss something? Have we really arrived at such a low point?
From what I recall, it didn't seem to be vindictive. Just that (IIRC) if your record wasn't on care.data, it wouldn't (couldn't) be auto-checked for matches against risk criteria, and hence you wouldn't get flagged up as being a suitable candidate for screening.
Which brings us on to the electronic prescriptions - the chemist where I pick up my diabetes medication recently informed me that they (and my GP) were going over to (exclusively) electronic prescriptions which may involve the chemist sharing my details and prescriptions with other companies in their group.
I objected.
They said "tough".
I objected
They said "tough - oh and if you want to carry on getting prescriptions from here there is no other option - you can't stay on the current system because we are no longer doing it"
Sadly, none of the chemists available within reach are going to be doing the old-style prescriptions either. So now I have a choice of:
1. Use electronic dispensing and allow my medical details to be shared with the group of companies
2. Don't get prescriptions.
It didn't help that all the people I spoke to, both in the GP and at the chemists, were utterly ignorant of both the DPA and the concept of data security.
To which I'd reply :
"In that case, can I just check that I've got your details correct for the upcoming prosecution ?"
That might just get them to start discussing their responsibilities - which include that they cannot coerce you into allowing this. You have to give your freely given and informed consent - this isn't one of those "covered by the exceptions" situations.
Usually, although if you've been elsewhere, like hospital, invites might come from other sources.
It's a horrible mess in my experience. Only this week my wife got a questionnaire from her GP practice. To paraphrase it said, "We'd like you to fill this out because we've identified you as being low risk" whereas myself, who is at higher than normal risk, received no such questionnaire. It was gender neutral btw (blood pressure). My GP practice is less than two miles from hers.
The principle of Care.data is a good thing but like all govt IT projects in this country, untrustworthy so we both opted out.
My father was a lawyer. He gave me this advice..
"Son, never trust a lawyer"
I would add..
"Son, never trust a Practice Manager"
FYI, a practice manager runs the facility the GPs work in, supposedly to perform the administration but with years of function creep / power grabs these "receptionists" now have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
..to the extent they control when & how appointments are made. ie: you can't now phone up & make an appointment in whatever free slot is available, you have to phone between certain times & they will not allow appointments to be booked more than a few days (eg: a week) in advance. No slots? Phone again tomorrow.
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"...isolate the fundamental fail particle."
No need for CERN; just stick pretty much any government minister or senior health service administrator in a blender or similar and you should get a load of individual particles since the aforementioned are made entirely of them.
Bloody satisfying too.
With respect to both accuracy and security it's not a good idea to have two copies of the data.
There seems to me to be no reason why data for large-scale surveys and research cannot be pre-processed locally at the GP, clinic and hospital level and the essentially anonymous results then collated nationally.
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