Guardian: Patients win right to keep records off NHS computer
The government has bowed to privacy concerns about a new NHS computer system and conceded that patients should be allowed a veto on information about their medical history being passed from their GP to a national database.
Following a Guardian campaign against the compulsory uploading of personal details to the system known as The Spine, Lord Warner, the health minister, will announce a plan that would allow individuals to review and correct their records and withhold them from the database.
Posted on December 16th, 2006 at 10:06 am
What’s really odd about this, to me, is that years ago I was interviewed for a clerical job, in a hospital in Oxford, which involved patients’ records. Of course these were all in those bulky casepapers. I asked (in an effort to show an interest, or at least to give the appearance of same) when these were going to be computerised and I was told that they wouldn’t be, because patients’ records were considered private and placing them on computer would render that impossible.
Unfortunately this story may not be all it seems - see the press release from the Big Opt Out at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/tboo-pr-2006dec16.pdf
Is that official? Thank goodness for that.
I’m a great believer in informed consent, not implied consent and so this is very good news indeed.
The Spine sounds like the title of a sci-fi movie set in a scary future world run by large corporations where everything you are is stored on a massive database.
Ahem.