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.

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Posted on December 16th, 2006 at 10:06am under Affronts to democracy, Chicken Nuggets, UK politics

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4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. ejh (436 comments.) on 16.12.2006 at 17:33 Permalink | Reply

    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.

  2. Terri (1 comments.) on 16.12.2006 at 21:56 Permalink | Reply

    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

  3. james higham (128 comments.) on 17.12.2006 at 20:04 Permalink | Reply

    Is that official? Thank goodness for that.

  4. Andy (2 comments.) on 18.12.2006 at 18:46 Permalink | Reply

    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.

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