Dear Patient Your Medical Records Are Perfectly Unsafe With Us

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Patient Private Details Shared In The Streets

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uploaded by Art de Rivers

 By Art De Rivers

Paper is a good  deterrent to stop thieves taking people's medical records home.  That is,  unless they are on UK NHS Hospital computers.

Yes,  paper is underrated and wonderful,  for in the average UK GP's office there are still thousands of paper records,  which will last far longer than electronic records - at maybe 10 or 15 years of life .  

Maybe you think paper is useful  too because it is a renewable resource and frankly we need to grow forests anywhere we can because Mr C. Arbon- Dioxide is getting too big for his boots in the atmophere - we all hear his stamp now..  

A computer thief  can, as an aside,  transfer thousands of personal records at almost the speed of light and frankly data can be mined,  filtered,  and sifted in increasingly sophisticated ways by those who have a mind for that - like criminals .. 

I know people in the UK who have used the UK data protection act to deliberately obtain paper records of their own  medical matters .. Why ?  They say they are reassuring themselves that if the NHS system goes down,  or is inefficient,  then they have a paper record that can be depended upon ..

Increasingly the UK NHS wants to create a "national digital spine" of records,  which sees summary records from localities and any one patient's medical business,  being stored in a national database.

A multi layered question arises from gut instinct - "How safe is that Mr Orwell ?

In the UK we have had millions of records go missing.  Millions . From Ministry of Defence records to doctors records to patient records to car license and benefit records on various data-sticks or laptops .. 

Here's the latest May 12th 2009  :

In the UK everyone's confidence-meter on systems and politicians etc is reading an alarming minus.

The needle cracked the glass in its strain to measure brokenness and smaller scale human systems are ready in the wings to inspire people to de-corportise health services and so much more ..

Smaller (paper)  systems are not necessarily  "backward" looking either ,  they are sometimes preserving too . .