Britain’s much-vaunted NHS, currently almost bankrupt due to New Labour’s ideologically neoliberal, market-based brand of incompetence, is nevertheless investing what is estimated to eventually be 31 billion pounds in a centralised national patient record database, known as The Spine.
Doctors, other health professionals and patients alike are opposed: given the propensity of UK government IT schemes to be shoddy, leaky, crap and easily compromised, a lot of people, including me, are not at all happy at the the thought of their confidential medical information being available to any petty bureaucrat or nosy parker, as will inevitably happen given the government’s IT project record so far.
At first there was no opt-out, then if you wanted to opt out you had to prove that you would suffer genuine mental distress if your records were put online. How the hell do you prove that before it’s happened?
The government has now given in and allowed patients to opt out without this necessity (how very nice of them) and the movement for everyone to opt out is growing apace. I’ll certainly be opting out – my notes run into several volumes and there’s no way I’m allowing access to my medical records out of my control at all.
The more that do opt out of this shabby piece of government deceit, the less viable the system becomes – if no-one’s in it, what use is it? The opt out movement is civil disobedience at its simplest, a simple ‘no’ against an unwarranted state intrusion. No-one seems to have a problem with medical records per se or that they should be held by your doctor or hospital: no, this is about who owns us, ourselves or the state as embodied by New Labour.
Whether the opt-out becomes massive and national is also a test of how strong the opposition to biometric ID cards is likely to be – if the populace rolls over supinely for this, then they’ll accept those too. Then we’ll really know where we stand.
Go here to find out more and how to opt out yourself.
Read more: UK politics, New Labour, NHS database, Opt-out
