PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY AND CARE.DATA

That this House views with concern the plans of NHS England and the Health and Social Care Information Centre known as care.data, which will extract and link large amounts of patient data as part of NHS care in order to improve healthcare and benefit researchers inside and outside the NHS; shares the concerns of the Information Commissioner, who delayed the start date for the harvesting of patient data by a year to spring 2014, due to concerns about the confidentiality of the extracted data and lack of public awareness; welcomes the public awareness campaign but believes that these plans, which operate on the assumption of presumed consent unless individuals opt out, fundamentally compromise the principle of patient confidentiality; has no faith in Government assertions that patient data will be coded in such a way as to guarantee anonymity, particularly as it reserves the right, in the public interest and for the benefit of the health service, to allow access to identifiable data; is mindful of the history of large-scale data mismanagement and leakage across government; believes that patients themselves should determine when and why their own medical information is used; further believes that if the Government wishes to improve healthcare it should first address deep-seated issues of mismanagement and lack of transparency and oversight in the NHS; and calls on the Government to delay indefinitely the introduction of care.data to allow further consultation with patients and patient groups and until the central principle of opting-in has been accepted.