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 No. 25  National Health Service Database

  The establishment of a National database for the N.H.S. is a project that demands serious questioning.  The costs of the scheme appear to be spiralling out-of-control.   The question that we would ask is ‘Why would a doctor practicing in Southampton want to know the medical details of a patient in Durham  ?’  ‘Is the government aware of the ease with which an experienced hacker can gain access to databases ?’   ‘Is the health minister aware of the use that such information could be to a malefactor ?’   True this condition exists within the present system but the culprit for disseminating such information would be far easier to detect.   Once the information is on a database we are dealing with robots !   Difficult to find out much from Robots or indeed to fire them !   The vulnerability will remain as long as the database remains.

  If the databases were limited to Health Regions rather than a National database at least the vulnerability would be limited to some extent, although once again, when passwords have been gleaned through a variety of devious methods all will be available to the dishonest within our society.   One of the burgeoning crimes of today is Identity Theft and the government should be aware of these dangers when proposing such wide-sweeping changes to the way we handle confidential data.