Are your medical records for sale?
From Susi Harris
Saturday, 12 October 2013
The government has been planning to extract data from our medical records for so-called 'secondary uses' for a long time. These are things like audit and business planning, the intent there is to improve patient care on a national scale.
However, now they seem also to be intending to sell these records to private companies at a price of £1 for each patient's record. Under changes to legislation, your GP can now be required to upload personal and identifiable information from the medical record of every patient in England to central servers at the Health and Social Care Information Centre.
Once this information leaves your GP practice, your doctor will no longer be in control of what data is passed on or to whom. The only way you can avoid this is to opt out by writing to your practice and asking them not to share your records in this way. Below is a link to a letter which you can print and send to your GP practice:
How to opt out letters
Petition: Stop Selling our NHS Records to Private Companies
From Eleanor Land
Sunday, 13 October 2013
This sort of casual abuse of patients' confidential records is disgraceful. It would appear that there is nothing this government would not stoop to in order to make a quick buck at the expense of their electorate's privacy. They really are despicable.
From Peter Rowlands
Friday, 18 October 2013
If the detail of this are right then there is a wry irony at play. On leaving Hebden Bridge and leaving the UK to return to New Zealand after 30 years, I asked to arrange to transfer my medical records from the Hebden Bridge Group Practice to a practice here in Wellington. I was told they couldn't be as they were the property of Her Majesty, the Queen. For a while I wondered whether her breakfast reading were the reports about the boils and blisters of her subjects. Now it appears she's trading treatments and therapies.
From Howard Walker
Monday, 9 December 2013
Peter if you have not yet resolved this issue (is HM The Queen seriously interested in retaining your medical records?) there are other ways. A couple of years ago I had an argument with an insurance company that required me to prove something to them; I needed my medical records. In my case (and I have no reason to believe an exception was made for me) electronic records were supplied by the surgery free of charge and paper records (if you needed them) could also be supplied for a nominal fee (around £10-£20 I believe).
So just approach the doctors, say you need your records (give them as little detail as possible) and they should provide them. Then you can hand them over to your new practice in NZ.