NHS England makes another privacy mess (and still hides abuses from patients)

It seems to be NHS England’s day for bad-news management – as the new BBC investigation finds that a creep shared screenshots of patient records for fun.

A few months ago NHS England loudly wanted a crackdown on creeps accessing records. Last week they quietly changed their minds.

Guidance that was supposed to stop unlawful access to your medical notes has been revised, and the revision gives creeps, voyeurs and ghouls more excuses to look.

Ministers may have promised you’d control your data, but what was announced with fanfare on protecting patients has quietly become its opposite: easier for creeps to look, easier for hospitals to cover it up, and not at all easier for you to know anything happened.

Parts of each draft were better than the other. When the process has the rigour of a chimp with a dartboard, DH/E pointing at where the dart landed is an admission there’s no process at all — and this is the process that will decide everything about the Single Palantir Record.

You can read the full details on the medConfidential website.

PS – On the Single Patient/Palantir Record, you may have seen the Department of Health in England claim that they have patient and public support for anything they decide to do because they have an “engagement portal”. We’ve FOIed the figures which show that so fewer people looked at the portal since it was created than read the single substack notification you’re reading now (if you subscribe by email – just those; plus a decent percentage of the “views” on the portal are me checking whether it’s still the vast wasteland that it continues to be)…

===

medConfidential publishes information for free on our website. If you wish to support our work, you can do so at medconfidential.org, in addition to the other ways substack promotes.