Seven per cent of doctors are mad: Official

Don't trust NHS IT

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Public Sector, 6th February 2008 16:04 GMT

Free whitepaper – PowerEdge M610 technical guidebook

British doctors are almost unanimous in not trusting the government to adequately secure patients' medical records.

A survey from the British Medical Association found that 93 per cent of doctors are "not confident patient data on the proposed NHS centralised database would be secure". Which makes you wonder which newspapers the other seven per cent of doctors read.

Eight out of ten doctors would not want their own medical records on the system, and nine out of ten did not feel they could assure their patients that their data would be safe.

Some doctors are already taking action by opting out themselves and encouraging their patients to do the same. TheBigOptOut.org, backed by No2ID, is providing information for GP surgeries keen to take a stand.

Today's example of government data security failure comes from GP's magazine Pulse which used Freedom of Information requests to find out how many NHS smartcards, used to access patient records, have gone missing. Some 4,147 cards have been lost or stolen out of a total of 438,314 issued. Eventually 1.2m cards will be issued.

Mike Small, EMEA director of security management strategy for CA, told the Reg: "If the government followed the same security guidelines which it requires its suppliers to follow we wouldn't have these problems - it's about management and execution not legislation. ®

Free whitepaper – Dell PowerEdge server benchmarks