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Brown to sell our Health Records

Next time you get fecked off for Life insurance, it could be because someone knows something about your state of health that you don't

Doctors fight plans to hand medical records to researchers and private companies

The British Medical Association has attacked plans which could give researchers and private companies access to NHS medical records without patients' consent.

The association said the Government was "dancing with the devil" with its proposals to give researchers, which could include commercial organisations, access to a giant computer database of patient records.

The Government's own health information watchdog has also written to ministers to express his concern about the [Full Story]
 
That's okay if you're fit and healthy, but if like me you have serious health issues, it's not that advisable to do so. Which the likes of me are the very ones that the Private Companies want information on.
 
it does mean that people will stop being honest with their doctor. I will harm peoples health, not that the government cares about that.

When you see your doctor, make sure you do not volunteer any info.

"sorry, i can't answer that question"
 
There is a hidden use of your medical records that the Department of Health does not tell patients about.

Every time you attend a hospital as either an outpatient, inpatient or an A&E attendence, all your personal and clinical details are sent to BT WITHOUT your consent. Even sensitive procedures such as abortions/terminations are sent to BT.

BT acts as a clearing house and sends your hospital a records to your Primary Care Trust, Strategic Health Authority, the Department of Health and even ‘Dr Foster’.

Your personal and clinical details include your postcode, date of birth, NHS number, GP details, consultant details, hospital, clinic your attended, procedure/operation, when you were admitted to hospital, the date of your discharge and whether you will be seen at the hospital again. As there are only 3 or 4 addresses to a postcode, with a date of birth it is easy to identify someone. See ‘Helen’s story‘ for further information.

If you attend a mental health clinic or are mental health inpatient this means that even more detailed personal and clinical information will be collected on what is known as a “Minimum Data Set” and sent to BT.

When the new NHS Care Records are fully operational this will also mean your GP records and any Sexual Health/GUM Clinic you have attended will be available for the Department of Health to use for these secondary purposes. At the present time your GP records do not leave your GP surgery, nor do your Sexual Health/GUM Clinic attendence medical records leave the clinic. In future, even if you choose to lock down your medical records or place sensitive information in sealed envelopes, this will all still be sent to the private comapny and distributed without your consent.

The Department of Health says that when your medical records are used for secondary uses they will be anonymised, but this could not be further from the truth. I have obtained a document from the Department of Health under the Freedom of Information Act that Professor Ross Anderson from Cambridge University put on his website, which says that they will not be anonymising this medical data. To find out just how much of a threat to privacy NHS Care Records represent, read on…

The Big Opt Out

Above is an extract. There was a horror story called "Helens Story" which she was inadvertently labelled an alcoholic by some penpusher ticking the wrong box on the computer screen.

It had quite a detrimental effect on her as this information barred her employability etc and she had a devils job removing it.
 
jarrod248 said:
The problem started with the NHS central spine - patients records were put on it without consent - you can ask your GP to take your records off the spine if they are on.

The main problem surrounding the Spine and the patient records system is that it was initially projected at X millions, and within a few months of the trials and testing period, went into the billions... and is still growing.

It was clumsily set up, hospital computer systems compatibility was totally ignored , hence so many issues with records not showing, details flashing up to users who weren't security cleared, and the intelligence and expertise that was helping to manage the front line support was completely ignored and used as a political tool - as always - to create jobs in a different part of the country.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about... :x

Selling the health records to companies is the government's way of trying to recoop some of the money which they've wasted whilst trying to stick to their IT target set in 2007, regardless of the outcome. It's scandalous, and we probably won't do anything to stop them as the the UK population,as a whole, just don't seem interested enough to take a stand on this issue.

I'd ask for a copy of records prior to requesting that they're taken off the spine...knowing the way it works, they'll get "lost" or deleted completely, if they are actually removed... :roll:
 
Article about Helen's Story below:

Helen Wilkinson was mistakenly labelled an alcoholic after a simple computer error by the NHS. An unknown official at a hospital was updating her medical records and inputted a wrong code. The mix-up meant she was recorded as having received treatment for alcoholism, instead of surgery.

Ms Wilkinson, 40, was furious and began a campaign to have all information about her permanently removed from the hospital's databanks. But she ran into a problem: the NHS already keeps electronic records on everyone who receives treatment from the health service, whether they are seen by a GP or at a hospital.

She succeeded in her campaign only because she took drastic action - she withdrew from the NHS altogether so that her records were deleted. Now she is refusing to be treated on the NHS ever again if her personal details are stored on an NHS computer. "I am putting myself at risk. I am not going back on a database if it kills me," she said.

Her case highlights two problems which are likely to grow with the government's plan to create a national database for all patient medical records.

Firstly, millions of patients will inevitably have mistakes in their computerised records which will in the future be read by more people than in the past. The government has not yet delivered on a promise that patients will be able to check their records on the internet for mistakes. Officials say that "there is no firm date yet".

Secondly, there is an unresolved question of whether patients who refuse to go on to national databases will still be allowed to receive treatment.

Ms Wilkinson's campaign has caused headaches for ministers and senior health officials, and has come to the attention of Downing Street advisers.

It started two years ago when she read about the government's £12bn plan to put everyone's medical records on one computer. "I thought that I did not like the sound of that and would like to opt out. I thought it would be easy," she said. Ms Wilkinson, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, knew her way around the NHS as she had been a health service manager for 20 years.

As she started to investigate, she wanted to see what information was stored on her in NHS records. She asked for copies of these records, but when they came back, she was in for a shock.

She discovered that the mistake about being an alcoholic had occurred after a hospital visit in 1988 and therefore been on her records ever since. "I went ballistic. To be labelled an alcoholic - who had seen it ? Who knows, literally hundreds could have seen it," she said.

Ms Wilkinson, who is a local councillor, was distressed to find out that the records had been distributed among several NHS bodies, such as her primary care trust and the strategic health authority. "I have lived locally for a long time. I know a lot of people who work in the NHS. They could have seen it."

She was also angry that the records had been shared with a private company which distributes personal medical records to academic researchers.

In 2003 she was contacted by researchers a week before she was due to have an operation. She believes people who are about to have an operation are in a vulnerable state, and that researchers should ask GPs first whether it is appropriate to approach a patient.

She also maintains also that the detailed data contained in medical records could become sensitive at a future point - for example, during a messy divorce.

Her battle to have her records deleted from all NHS computers took nearly two years to win, and needed the help of her MP, Paul Goodman, who raised her case in a parliamentary debate.

Citing the Data Protection Act, she argued that the NHS was causing her "unwarranted and substantial distress" by storing data on her. At first, the Department of Health did not know how to react. Officials said her request was "neither simple nor straightforward".

But after much argument, she received confirmation in July from a senior health official that her "data has been removed from all centrally managed databases". However, the department said this was a special case, and did not set a precedent.

Since withdrawing from the NHS, she has been treated by her GP, who is in effect seeing her for free. But undoubtedly she will have to be treated for more serious illnesses by specialist doctors.

She blames the government for failing to resolve the conundrum of how to treat her without creating electronic records on her.

Yesterday the Department of Health said the case "illustrates many of the reasons why we need to modernise NHS IT systems. We have to have information about patients to be able to treat them safely and effectively and can never entirely eliminate human error, but the new systems and controls will improve the way information is handled."

Privacy campaigners who support her say the government is not entitled to circulate patients' medical records without consent, and that the entire scheme to set up a national "spine" of such records may be illegal.

Dr Fleur Fisher, one of the trustees of an online thinktank, the Foundation for Information Policy Research, and former head of the British Medical Association's ethics division, describes the project as "data rape". Patients are being urged to write to their GPs and boycott the system. Yesterday, the Guardian disclosed that next year the health department intends to start to upload millions of medical records on to the spine without patient consent, unless there is a rethink. A taskforce is due to report to the health minister Lord Warner before Christmas on ways to resolve the crisis.
 
This government is hateful - filled with hate and easy to hate because of these types of intervention.
 
I've seen my records too. I went to see my GP about an eye infection, and noticed that my GP was spending more time looking at my right elbow than my eye, after a few minutes he came out with 'the surgeon was good, I can't see the scar'...... According to my notes, I had recently had an compound fracture to my right elbow area, and had had 2 plates put in, apparently without me noticing!

The words 'Public Sector' and 'Data' fill me with dread...
 
It's all part of Browns plan to control our entire lives.

There soon won't be a need for a Police force, they just sent a Scientist to take a Dab with a Swab, whack it into the DNA machine, and Hey-Fecking-Presto - "Your're fecking Guilty my Son".

They just want everything. And still dumb arrsed cnut's say, 'If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about'.
 
mad_mac said:
The Department of Health says that when your medical records are used for secondary uses they will be anonymised, but this could not be further from the truth. I have obtained a document from the Department of Health under the Freedom of Information Act that Professor Ross Anderson from Cambridge University put on his website, which says that they will not be anonymising this medical data. To find out just how much of a threat to privacy NHS Care Records represent, read on…
it.

I was with you there until you mentioned Ross Anderson, who seems to me to be a 'rent-a-quote' idiot who pops up everywhere, trying to drum up business for himself and his cronies. He was known as a bit of a t1t when he was an undergraduate and doesn't seem to have changed.

Don't get me wrong, I think there some very serious issues at stake here, but can we get a more sensible professor.

And I certainly would not trust BT with data, having come across their work in the field of Identity Management!
 
I'll save them the bother.

DigitalGeek:

Severely damaged and non functional thyroid.
Loose chip of bone in c-spine.
Spina Bifida Occulta.
Smokes.
Drinks.
Eats Lard.
Manic Depressive.
Family history of heart disease and mental illness.

There. Done.
 
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