care.data
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Privacy campaigners team up with leading public health professor to fix Hunt’s ‘complete nonsense’ on care.data By Caroline Molloy
Hunt’s fix for the troubled ‘care.data’ project – debated by MPs today – is “complete nonsense” according to medConfidential. They have teamed up with public health professor Allyson Pollock to propose an alternative fix to the troubled care.data project. Continue reading
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NHS: medConfidential Bulletin, 7th March 2014
Following a disastrous showing from NHS England and HSCIC officials [from time code 1:20:30] in front of the Health Select Committee a fortnight ago, the government has laid a number of last-minute amendments to a piece of legislation called the Care Bill, which is now in its final stages before becoming law. Continue reading
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Triple-headed NHS privacy scare after hospital data reach marketers, Google By Simon Sharwood
On page eight, a section titled “The cloud can transform the way the NHS connects and uses data” the discussion turns to “an archive called Hospital Episode Statistics (HES)” that contains “a huge amount of detailed data” about the activity of “every Hospital in England.” A busy time, then, for HSCIC’s spin doctors and a… Continue reading
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Can anyone patch up care.data, or is it too late? By Jane Fae
Care.data has had a bad seven days. Last Tuesday it received a serious mauling by the Commons Health Committee. On Friday, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt came sailing to the rescue with an announcement of new laws that will bar the NHS from selling personal medical records for insurance and commercial purposes – though care.data boss… Continue reading
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Secret government contracts undermine our democracies. Let’s stop them By Jonathan Gray
How do we know that the money we collectively give to our governments is being properly spent? We don’t. A new campaign seeks to change that. Continue reading
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Is selling our medical data to insurers a crime – or not? By Jane Fae
As more revelations emerge about the sale of our hospital data to the insurance industry, misleading claims that a massive expansion in data collection is totally safe, are failing to convince. Continue reading
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medConfidential Bulletin, 21st February 2014
As you will by now be aware, on Tuesday afternoon the Director of Patients and Information at NHS England, Tim Kelsey, announced a second 6 month delay to the uploading of data from GP practices across England. The first delay to uploads last September was only achieved after medConfidential had alerted the Information Commissioner’s Office… Continue reading
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NHS IT boss Kelsey wrongly claims care.data leaflet sent to 100% of homes By Jane Fae
Confidence in NHS England’s commitment to transparency and openness received another blow this morning as a full and frank explanation of yesterday’s events by NHS IT Director Tim Kelsey made two more inaccurate and misleading statements about the care.data leafleting process. Continue reading
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NHS England delays share of personal data By Jane Fae
As criticism of the controversial care.data scheme reached a crescendo last night, and with at least two possible legal challenges now under way, NHS England finally gave in to critics, announcing a further six month pause to the project – and yet more money to be spent on publicity campaigns. Continue reading
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Top Brit docs wade into GP data grab row, demand ‘urgent’ NHS England talks By Kelly Fiveash
Pressure is mounting on NHS England to stall its incoming data grab of GP-stored medical records, after another health body said that the government needed to improve public awareness of the controversial scheme. Continue reading
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GPs slam NHS England for poor publicity of data grab plan By Kelly Fiveash
The Tory-led government has failed to make a good case for its plans to share GP medical records with information that is already stored by NHS England, the Royal College of General Practitioners warned on Wednesday. Continue reading
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UK: ACT NOW to protect your medical confidentiality
Sometime in January 2014 you may have received a leaflet via junk mail, entitled ‘Better information means better care‘ (2MB PDF file). It may not be clear from the leaflet that a significant change in what is done with your medical records is about to happen. Continue reading
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How safe are your medical records?
At Liberty we’ve reacted with significant concern over NHS England’s new plans for a ‘care.data’ database. This could see your private medical records – including highly sensitive data – shared on a single database. Continue reading
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Hunt seeks to shed his duty to keep our medical data safe By Benedict Cooper
Last week in a public committee session of the Care Bill, MPs grilled Conservative ministers within the Department of Health over the dangers of the “unintended consequences” of changes to the way data is handled which could, they said, lead to private providers and insurance companies gaining access to confidential records. Continue reading
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UK national health records database to have ‘backdoors’ for police, govt?
While care.data will not store the names of the patients, it will include National Health System numbers, dates of birth, postcodes, ethnicity and sex, in addition to health condition and prescribed drugs. The goal is to sell access to the data to university researchers, health insurance companies and other parties, which can make use of… Continue reading
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Care.data questions mount – just who’ll get our medical data? By Jane Fae
Official attempts to inform patients about what will happen to their data when the new care.data database is implemented are inadequate and, on the latest evidence, seriously misleading. In August of last year, the Information Commissioner warned GPs they’d likely breach Data Protection Act if they allowed their patient data to be uploaded to care.data… Continue reading
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‘Maybe we haven’t been clear enough about med records opt-out’, admits NHS data boss By Kelly Fiveash
NHS data chief Tim Kelsey admitted today that the health service had failed to adequately inform patients about how they can opt out of having their GP medical records shared throughout England. Continue reading
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NHS: GP surgeries MUST DO BETTER on data handling, says ICO By Kelly Fiveash
A number of GP surgeries in England allowed their employees to have unrestricted internet access – thereby increasing the risk of data being leaked, hacked and targeted by viruses, Britain’s information watchdog warned today. Continue reading
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Sleepwalking into an information grab by private health? By Jane Fae
NHS England has still not done enough to inform patients of the privacy-busting implications of the new ‘care.data’ scheme, former home secretary David Davies tells openDemocracy. One of the most ambitious privacy-busting information grabs of the new century looks set to resume shortly. Following a minor reverse last year, the way is once more being… Continue reading
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Why you should be pissed off about Care.data By Alice
From the Spring, medical information about you which was previously only kept to help understand you as an individual – information from consultations, notes on prescriptions – will be uploaded to a central database to become one of the world’s most complete health databases. Our records are being connected to make them stronger. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 