NHS Chief ‘Having A Laugh’ Over Data Security

Posted on December 26, 2007
Filed Under News |

There were recent reports that a person had been found who “completely and wholeheartedly” believed that the government and all its agencies, along with every public sector institution could be trusted with the data of the British people. However, when it turned out that he was the Norfolk and East Anglia Village Idiot champion, the stories faded from view.

The simple truth is that nobody in their right mind would imagine that anyone connected with New Labour could be trusted with anything more valuable than a recipe for whelks and the impression is that they would mess that up pretty spectacularly, given the chance.

Which makes it odd that the NHS boss, just after it was admitted that his, let’s call it business, as we may as well get used to the idea that this is what it has now become, had lost hundreds of thousands of patient details, is now claiming that we can be confident in the NHS data systems.

Perhaps he has been sampling some of the drugs.

The Times Online has this:

The National Health Service can be trusted to handle patient records despite the loss of thousands of personal details from hospitals, according to David Nicholson, its chief executive.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats want a planned electronic database of 50 million patient records in England to be reconsidered.

But Mr Nicholson said that the losses were being taken seriously and the new e-records system would be more secure than internet banking.

It should perhaps be mentioned here that a man with your personal details flashing in neon letters on a sandwich board and ringing a bell and reciting the same details through a megaphone in a crowded shopping centre, while semi naked women hand out leaflets with the same details printed on them to everyone is significantly more secure than the banking system.

The Guardian has this:

Ministers faced embarrassment over more mislaid data yesterday when they were forced to admit that they did not have details on what information had been lost by nine NHS trusts.

The loss of data potentially covering tens of thousands of patients’ records has been disclosed to the Department of Health by the trusts and to the information commissioner.

Ministers will be worried that the loss will further undermine confidence in the department’s plans for a new computer database of all NHS patients’ records.

Maybe, if the NHS wants to drum up new business for New Labour’s brave new world where everything is reduced to commerce, its people should look into the possibility that there is a new contagion in the land, more virulent than the plague, more dangerous than avian flu.

It is called absolute barefaced bloody lying.

Maybe the whole government should be taken into hospital and experimented on to see if there is a cure. Then make the data of the experiment as secure as this administration knows how, which is to say, publicly available to all.

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