NHS Loses Confidential Records on Hundreds of Thousands of Patients

By: N_Walayat

The NHS delivered fraudsters a potentially early Christmas present by nine NHS trusts losing the computerised records of hundreds of thousands of patients across England, as data disks went missing.

Its a case of here we go again..

The NHS not content with sending thousands of patients to an early grave through incompetence as a consequence of failure in the most basic of hygiene rules, now confirms the loss of potentially highly confidential data. When quizzed on the loss of data, the health minister Dawn Primarolo conceded that she did not know exactly what data on patients had been lost.

The problem with regards the data security is not just limited to the NHS, incompetence in all regards is rife across the whole spectrum of the public sector, with some of the major disclosures of loss of data during recent months including :

• Loss of financial data of ALL of the UK Child Benefit Claimants totaling some 25 million people.
• Learner Drivers data totaling 3 million people lost.

And those are just the biggies !, For data is constantly being lost on an ongoing basis for the odd thousand here, and the odd thousand there, such as the HMRC losing data on over 6,000 private pension holders just a few days ago.

One can conclude that the fact that the NHS has wasted a staggering £10 billion on a computer system that does not work as a blessing in disguise, for if it did work the headlines could have read data lost on 50 million patients.

To imagine that in this climate the government wants to push ahead, to put even more personal information on every UK citizen into the hands of the incompetent public sector in the form of smart ID cards.

By Nadeem Walayat
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Nadeem Walayat has over 20 years experience of trading, analysing and forecasting the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. We present in-depth analysis from over 100 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets. Thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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