UK government reacts to campaign opt out of central medical database
(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)
English health minister Lord Warner has reacted to TheBigOptOut.org, a
campaign that mobilises citizens to opt out from a proposed national
medical database. He is offering patients an opt-out from one part of
the new system – a synopsis for emergency care, which contains things
like your prescriptions and whether you are diabetic. He is not
offering an easy opt-out from the full database. The plan is to upload
data from family doctors and hospitals over the next year or two, to
regional hosting centres. Custody of the data will then pass from
doctors to the Chief Medical Officer, a government official.
The campaign is now focussed on persuading people to forbid their
doctors from uploading the data in the first place. A November poll
showed that most general practitioners would not upload data without
patient consent; another showed that a majority of patients did not
approve of a compulsory central database.
The Big Opt Out
http://www.thebigoptout.org
Latest media coverage of campaign (20.12.2006)
EDRI-gram: Campaign launched in UK to opt out of central medical database
(6.12.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.23/uk_medical_database
(Contribution by EDRI-member Foundation for Information Policy Research –
UK)