Caldicott: NHS workers should 'have the confidence to share information'

On one condition

"It doesn't mean anyone can look at your health records, but it does mean using anonymous data to make new medical breakthroughs."

Fine, take our medical data but any medical breakthroughs gained through must unequivocally become public property as soon as they are discovered. If the industry gets access to our information for free then we should have access to their results. If they want to the privilege of charging us for results gleaned from our data then they'd better be prepared to pay us for our data.

Each and every one of us.

"Prime Minster David Cameron said he wanted to make anonymised versions of medical records available to researchers and the private sector."

This makes me almost irrationally angry. These records are extremely personal and are between a patients GP and them (and when necessary hospital DR's etc) I really don't like the idea of them being randomly made available to private companies anonymous or not. Mr Cameron needs to be very careful here, his desire to hand everything over to his private sector buddies could backfire in his face. At the very least he's asking for my foot up his ass.

I will however agree with the above that if this is used for 'important' research and all of the data gained becomes public domain then I would be more happy.

That's more general auditing information than is being proposed though from my understanding.

The company Dr Foster have had access to detailed hospital records for years. They use data on every single admission in every single trust (e.g. hospitals) in the country. This is how they calculate their hospital standardised mortality ratio (HSMR).

http://www.drfosterhealth.co.uk/

It's just a pity that 4 weeks into the HSCIC handover they are still not in a position to relay data to any of the consumers because they 1) they can't make their mind up how to do it 2) they didn't take into account the complexity of all the data sources and 3) they lack the skill sets to implement any solution.

All the while the CCG's, CSU's etc are unable to commission because they don't have any data to play with.

It's an absolute shambles.

It'll never happen

The NHS is a collection of unions, some real, some masquerading as professional bodies (BMA, RCN, etc). All unions and guilds know that knowledge is power and sharing knowledge diminishes that power. So I expect a protracted proxy fight over 'privacy' over the coming months and years with every union member involved learning to spout a standardised list of privacy horror stories .