Medical Confidentiality

Atos Healthcare, the private company paid by the Government to help get more cancer patients back to work, has been ordering its medical staff to sign the Official Secrets Act. Britain's leading liberal newspaper considers it "highly unlikely" that medical personnel would be prosecuted under the Act if they blew the whistle on matters of patient safety, although the source of this estimate of probability is unclear. Certainly Britain's Head Boy, who thinks employees should be fined for seeking legal redress and who regards the nation's foreign policy mainly as a pretext for helping underprivileged arms dealers, might well take a jolly dim view of any unethical behaviour; and then, of course, there is Nick Clegg. For its own part, Atos claims that it has contracts with the Ministry of Defence, which is why staff working for the Department for Work and Pensions have to be treated like military personnel; evidently drawing up a separate security policy just because the work is different would have been contrary to market forces. A spokesbeing for the Department for Work and Pensions said that, despite being run by Iain Duncan Smith, the department was not aware.