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NHS plan to collect patient data from GPs set to be delayed due to privacy concerns, Labor says Politics News

An NHS system set up to pull patient data from doctors’ offices in England is set to be put on hold until people know what information will be made available, Labor says.

The opposition calls for a public consultation and an information campaign to allay privacy concerns among healthcare professionals.

The program is expected to collect information on people’s treatments, referrals and appointments over the past 10 years, as well as other data from medical records kept in GP systems.

In order to protect the identity of patients, the data collected is encoded by NHS Digital.

NHS Data Sharing System
Picture:
This form shows how a patient can withdraw
NHS Data Sharing System

However, the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) fear the plans will be put in place too quickly, without enough consultation with patients – and they want a delay.

Within the current deadline, the BMA says patients have until June 23 to refuse to have their encoded health data transmitted to NHS Digital.

Daily “snippets” of coded data from practice systems to NHS Digital will then begin from July 1, he said.

Alex Norris, shadow minister for primary care, called for the public consultation and information campaign in a letter to Sarah Wilkinson, chief executive of NHS Digital, and copy to the health secretary Matt hancock.

The Labor MP said he “fully supports the principle of better data sharing” as a measure to save lives and improve healthcare, but the deployment “must be based on trust “.

He cautioned: “I echo the concerns of the entire healthcare industry that the lack of transparency about which organizations can access this personal data is of deep concern.

“Patients need to be fully informed of what data is accessible and by whom, so I wrote to NHS Digital asking them to suspend their next GP data collection until these questions are …

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Source: news.sky.com
This notice was published: 2021-06-06 20:55:00

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