I thought people might be interested in this - I signed up to receive the bulletins from medconfidential by email, and this is the first one for a couple of years.
Hello again from medConfidential,
It’s been a couple of years since our previous newsletter – you may have signed up a while ago to hear news from us about what happens to your health data. If you remember us from the GP data grab from 2021, that grab got suspended and still hasn’t come back.
If you no longer want to receive our newsletter, please just hit reply and let us know, and we’ll take you off the list.
Access to GP records via the NHS app
From next week, any correspondence sent to your GP will be available to you through the NHS app (and, over time, the NHS website) as the Government has contractually required your GP to facilitate access to “prospective medical records” in your GP record to the NHS app.
In simple terms, these are letters about your care – not “to” you as such, but to / from different doctors providing your care, who may also send a copy to your GP. The doctors outside your GP have not been effectively told that this is happening, and so won’t know to take it into account when writing such letters.
Some letters may be particularly distressing as they may contain medical language you don’t know and need to look up, or may contain bad news and diagnoses that the author of the letter expects a doctor to break to you with compassion. You may also see from these letters how much work is shifted onto your GP from other parts of the NHS, and how secondary care “manages” their waiting lists.
Online access will be helpful for most patients, but the process of making this information available has also created unnecessary risks – such as those described by Refuge – which Government with NHS England has chosen to leave unaddressed.
If your device is not your own, or if it is shared in a way which makes this sort of access uncomfortable, or if you have any other reason to be concerned, you can send your practice a message asking for “prospective access” to be turned off for your GP record.
We have slightly more detail on our website.
Coming soon at some point: Palantir
At some point “soon”, the Government will give NHS England permission to spend half a billion pounds of NHS budget on software from US spy-tech company Palantir.
Officials at NHS England have been talking about this for 3 years, and procuring it for 10 months or so, but we still don’t know much more for certain at this time. We continue to watch closely, but those responsible for the procurement have contradicted themselves on what they will do multiple times, and can still change their minds again.
medConfidential doesn’t yet know whether you will have to do anything (new) to protect your data. We’ll have more in the next newsletter.
What can you do?
Hopefully you remember who we are and what we do. If for any reason you want to leave our mailing list, just hit reply and we’ll take you off.
There will likely be more information on NHS data plans in the near future than there has been for the last couple of years – as promised when you signed up, we only send a newsletter when there’s something that affects you directly. We post shorter updates on a more frequent basis to our twitter feed.
We’ll be in touch again when there is more relevant news. In the meantime, please do pass this Bulletin on to anyone to whom you think it may be relevant.
Phil Booth & Sam Smith
25th October 2023
coordinator@medConfidential.org
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MedConfidential newsletter, sent by request.
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There were various links in the newsletter that got lost in the copy and paste. The words that were links and the links themselves are :
"contractually required" legislation.gov.uk/uksi/202...
"described by Refuge" refuge.org.uk/news/joint-le...
"We have slightly more detail on our website " medconfidential.org/2023/pr...
"our Twitter feed" twitter.com/medConfidential/
If you want to see all the recent articles by medConfidential then this is the link you need - just keep scrolling :
Opinions of MyGP app
Online pharmacy slapped with £130,000 fine for flogging customer data
