If you have spent time in hospital in the last ten years then your data will undoubtabley be in the hands of The Staple Inn Actuarial Society. Report says data covering in-patient stays between 1997 and 2010 were used to track patients' medical histories. Patients have been identified by their date of birth and their postcode according to the Daily Telegraph. and the data used by the insurance body to work out premiums. when they combined the data alongside credit ratings it resulted in higher premiums for most people under the age of 50. The newly formed Health & Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC),
which collects national health and social care data, said that the
records referred to by the Staple Inn Actuarial Society had been
provided by a predecessor body, the NHS Information Centre. This comes less than a week after the NHS had to postpone the roll out of the GPs and hospital data sharing scheme amidst worries of data protection for individuals.The HSCIC insisted that the records were not used to analyse individual insurance premiums but to analyse general variances in critical illness. This is what the Association of Medical Research Charities chief executive Sharmila Nebhrajani had to say about data sharing on the 18th of february 2014, she said " any sharing of data must be done with care, competence and consent" " care that respects the sensitivity of the data, competence to ensure that information is held securely and most importantly with the informed consent of the public. This has obviously been overlooked by the NSCICs predecessor body, the NHS Information Centre. So who is to be held accountable for the selling off of peoples sensitive data and what assurances can the government give that the data will not be further sold on ? I suspect that this government does not have the answers. When the NHS put their massive data share scheme on hold for six months who had the knowledge that this was happening and why were we not informed? privacy experts warn there will be no way for the public to work out who
has their medical records or to what use their data will be put.
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