Monthly Archives: February 2014


Conrad Quilty-Harper writes for the Daily Mirror: The launch of a controversial database which would centralise access to GP surgeries healthcare records has been delayed from April until Autumn. Why? Let’s start at the beginning, this stuff is quite complicated. What is care.data? The NHS wants to share data collected at GP surgeries about individual patients so researchers can find ways to improve healthcare and generally make the NHS more efficient. Since 1989, researchers have been able to request hospital episode statistics including billions of records from hospital visits. Care.data will open up the data behind about 300 million patient consultations every year at GP surgeries. The controversial bit is that this involves using identifiable information — like people’s date of birth, full postcode, NHS number or gender — to connect the data together. The NHS says the data is protected, but people are still worried about the implications for […]

Why should you care about care.data?


Nick Triggle writes for the BBC: There comes a point when the weight of criticism becomes so much that the dam bursts. For NHS England – and its Care.data project – that point was reached on Tuesday. When you have a group of bodies as disparate as the British Medical Association, privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch and the Association of Medical Research Charities united in their condemnation, you know you have a problem. The organisation has defused the problem for now by agreeing to delay the data-sharing project by six months. But how did it get to this point? After all, the concept of the giant database has the backing of almost the entire medical community, many charities and some of the most influential patient groups.

Care.data: How did it go so wrong?


Charlie Cooper writes for the Independent: Controversial plans to trawl patient records from every GP surgery in England have been put on hold, amid concerns from doctors and ministers that the public have not been properly informed about how their private data will be used. The care.data programme, which was scheduled to begin collecting the confidential information from GPs in April, will now be delayed until the autumn, NHS England has announced. The pause will allow the NHS more time to inform people about “ the benefits of using the information, what safeguards are in place, and how people can opt out if they choose to,” officials said. The Department of Health has grown increasingly concerned in recent weeks that NHS England has not sufficiently reassured the public – nor the medical profession – about how the care.data programme would benefit patients. Critics have also warned that the private data, […]

Victory for privacy as NHS database is delayed