IF YOU VALUE YOUR PRIVACY, THIS IS A MUST READ!
January 22, 2014: I have received the article below on my Facebook page:-
IMPORTANT CHANGES TO UK MEDICAL RECORDS
My UK friends may want to sign the form I've linked below. It notifies your Doctor that you refuse consent for your identifiable information to be transferred from your practice systems for any purpose other than your medical care. GP practices across England will soon be required to supply patients’ personal and confidential medical information, on a regular and continuous basis, to the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). The information uploaded will be used for purposes other than your direct medical care (these are so-called “secondary uses”).
Medical staff treating you in GP surgeries, hospitals, A&E and out-of-hours centres will NOT use, or be able to use, this database. However, the uploaded data is likely to be made available to organisations outside of the NHS, such as universities and commercial organisations.
Under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, GP practices have no choice but to allow the HSCIC to extract this information. Once the data has been extracted, the GP practice is no longer the data controller for that information, and cannot control or protect in any way how that information is used, shared or who has access to it. Although GP practices cannot object to this information leaving the practice, individual patients and their families can instruct their practice to prohibit the transfer of their data, i.e. you have the right to opt-out. If you do nothing, i.e. you do not opt out, then your medical information will be extracted and uploaded to the HSCIC. Once uploaded, you will not be able to get this data deleted by the HSCIC. So if you want to opt out, you need to act now. Click on the link below for more information:-
