The Coalition's prompt and disgraceful U-turn on their commitment not to build an enormous database of all our medical records exposes patients to significant intrusions on their privacy.
And as if on cue, the potential for the abuse of such systems is demonstrated: look what's just happened in the States:
The state has fined five California hospitals a total of $675,000 for failing to prevent unauthorized access to confidential patient medical files.
In the worst of the incidents, a single employee wrongly accessed 204 patient records.
There is no rational basis for assuming that British hospitals are much more secure than American ones. But the larger point is that, as bad as those abuses are, at least such files were restricted to those hospitals and the people who worked in them. Just how bad do you think the abuse will be when the files can be accessed nationally!?
The ever-great Phil Booth over at No2ID tells me that the one time the NHS tried to perform a proper audit of access to medical files, in a single hospital trust in Leeds, some 70,000 inappropriate accesses to private records were detected in a single month. The answer from the bureaucrats was obvious - they didn't do any more auditing.
There is a real danger that fears about such abuses will erode trust in the confidentiality between patient and doctor. People should be able to speak with absolute confidence to those who work in medicine. Undermining that may do genuine harm to health.
But why should things like facts interfere with bureaucratic determination to establish "a single source of truth" about us?
And remember... these parties in government are the ones who promised to reverse the rise of the surveillance state..!
By Alex Deane
Make sure you opt out and serve a data subject notice on your doctor's surgery. The data subject notice is under section 10 of the Data Protection Act 1998.
http://www.thebigoptout.com/?page_id=3
Posted by: blastproof@gmail.com | 12/06/2010 at 01:32 PM