The front door, or rather back door, tactics of the shadowy Health and Social Care Information Centre have achieved a sort of slow-burn blowback over the last few weeks. Kicked off with a junk mail leaflet that aimed to be funky but turned out flakey – eye catching shape, double helix on the front, but the helix unravelling on the inside, and written by a Kafkaesque we who never said who we were, in opaque prose that bizarrely got a Crystal Mark for Clarity from the Plain English Campaign – the idea was to have patients default into allowing the NHS to hoover personally identifiable GP medical records into a vast data silo the size of Russia, generally for the purposes of improving care. But that was only part of it. Buried in the flyer, we also had plans to flog off your data, including sometimes personally identifiable so called red data, but only after the strictest approvals, you understand. Or at least we did. Whether the rest of us did was another matter.
