I'm a GP too
There is no medical benefit whatsoever in having your whole health record online. If you have an odd illness, an alert bracelet will work just fine, and be far more reliable, even if they do look a bit naff.
But the bottom line is that the spine is the biggest Trojan in the history of computing. Doctors know there are minimal health benefits. Put simply, most of the time we don't need the full notes. What we need is a précis.
In Wales, already we have a cheap effective system, where key, non-confidential medical problems, and current medication for each patient is summarised, uploaded nightly, and accessible only by other doctors via a secure NHS only network. It's all that's needed for healthcare, and all I as a GP would need when treating a patient I don't know.
The Spine is about giving your full medical record away to private providers, to allow private companies to operate within the NHS, and to allow other agencies (social services certainly, police probably) to also have basic data on the UK population.
And on top of that, would you want your full medical record, available for anybody with an NHS connection to read. Because you know full well that in an organisation as massive as the NHS, there are bound to be at least a planeload of hapless idiots who hasn't got a clue how to secure their PC.
As for the anonymous coward. If your wife was a secretary in the NHS and you'd caught a dose of something suspicious needing a discrete clinic visit, or if you were running away from an abusive family, would you still be happy for your record to be on the spine? It's easy for the healthy and smug to say we have nothing to hide. You don't have anything to hide. But real life isn't like that.
As for paper notes and the Bahamas - you plainly have no clue about how modern General Practice works, and I find your suggestion that we'd breach our patient's confidentiality with a non healthcare professional crass and insulting. Perhaps you should pop over to Wales to see how a simple straightforward, integrated IT system works to quickly benefit patients. And any of the IT experts here would tell you that what the NHS needs is a series of databases that have a standard system of communicating securely with each other, and not one big, ridiculously expensive database that anybody with any knowledge of the history of government IT, knows full well is not going to work.
All the spine should be would be a protocol for existing IT software to intercommunicate.
The fact that it doesn't do this, and that the filesize is a lot biger than you'd expect confirms it's a Trojan.