Leatherhead Matters

You may have heard of the NHS Spine. It’s not an orthopaedic unit for back problems, it’s an IT project to put all patients records on a central data base. Given the Government’s abysmal record on personal data protection, one might think the Government & the NHS would be reconsidering this project. No, apparently not, it’s still full speed ahead and the NHS Spine web site is still proudly proclaiming  that the Spine project will “provide safer, more joined up care“.

Which all seems to ignore a number of incidents in which just about every hospital staff member rushes to a computer terminal every time a celebrity checks into hospital. Bureaucracies have a habit of downloading centrally stored data on to more easily managed local media. There have already been several instances of NHS Hospital Trusts such as, Hackney Primary Care Trust losing CDs (Hackney lost a CD containing the medical records of 160,000 patients).

Now it seems that the NHS Spine project is such a wonderful idea that the National Association of doctors in Germany are lobbying their Health Minister to abandon all centrally stored medical record projects.