LiveWire

Soon drug companies, insurance companies, researchers and others will be able to pay to access NHS records from a national database called care.data. An application to obtain information will have to be approved. There are five reasons why data can be accessed: health intelligence, health improvement, audit, health service research and service planning. That narrows it down, doesn’t it? Data identifying the patients will be scrubbed, but not enough to assure complete anonymity. The scrubbing process is referred to as “pseudonymisation”.

NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms

Harvested from GP and hospital records, medical data covering the entire population will be uploaded to the repository controlled by a new arms-length NHS information centre, starting in March. Never before has the entire medical history of the nation been digitised and stored in one place.

Proponents say the plan will ultimately save lives. To address privacy concerns, the NHS is sending a leaflet to 26 million households.

Better Information Means Better Care

Sharing information about the care you have received helps us understand the health needs of everyone and the quality of the treatment and care provided.

We will only use the minimum information needed to improve patient care and services.

Individual consent will not be required for any particular request and no one will be notified if their health information has been given out. You can opt out of the whole thing by asking your doctor to make a note in your medical records, but it won’t matter if there are “special circumstances”.

We have explained how useful information about you is, and the steps that we take to protect your privacy. However, you may want to prevent confidential information about you from being shared or used for any purpose other than providing your care (except in special circumstances allowed by law, such as when there is a public emergency). If you do not want information that identifies you to be shared outside your GP practice, please ask the practice to make a note of this in your medical record. This note will prevent your confidential formation from being used other than in special circumstances.

Effectively, the government owns the information and will do whatever they want with it. This process is called __________ (fill in the blank).