Most patients reject NHS database in poll
David Leigh and Rob Evans write in The Guardian:
A national campaign was launched last night to persuade people to refuse on privacy grounds to have their medical records uploaded to a national database. Guy Herbert, of the No2ID group, which is also campaigning against the introduction of identity cards, said: “We’d like to get up to a million people to contact their GPs.”
The campaigners, who are part-financed by the charitable Joseph Rowntree trust, released ICM poll findings commissioned by the trust which they said showed a majority of the population was hostile to Whitehall’s plans.
The figures show 53% of those questioned were either “strongly opposed” or “tended to oppose” the centrepiece of the Department of Health’s £12bn NHS computerisation scheme. These results follow a Medix poll of doctors earlier this month, which found that 52% of GPs were not prepared to upload their clinical records to the so-called national Spine without each patient’s consent.
Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge, and one of the campaigners, said: “The NHS database starts off with 53% of patients opposed. The opposition can only get stronger once the public realise what NHS administrators plan to do.” On the platform at last night’s campaign launch in London was the former Conservative foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Although he and the Tories are not officially linked to the NHS data opt-out campaign, he spoke in support of opposition to identity cards, and to government databases in general.
More information on “The Big Opt Out”, including a template of a letter to send to your GP, is available here.
