Freedom of Information

The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which is responsible for providing private companies with details of NHS patients, has suddenly remembered that the small matter of confidentiality has yet to be abolished. As is traditional with Government IT projects, there seems to have been some confusion between two admittedly subtle but nevertheless still slightly distinct concepts, which may be rendered in laymen's terms as The Right Thing To Do and The Wrong Thing To Do. For the moment, at least in theory and subject to the demands of corporate profiteering, patients have the right to register an objection to their details being shared with anyone who might happen to take a benevolent interest in them; some hundreds of thousands of people duly registered their objections, but HSCIC found that it lacked "the resources or processes to handle such a significant level of objection”, so the details were passed on anyway. This is known as lack of fail-safe procedures and was The Wrong Thing To Do. Fortunately, in a few years there will be no further need for bureaucratic middle-men like HSCIC, as the NHS will be mostly owned by the same private companies that are now requesting the data.