NHS denies personal information will be shared in appointments row

NHS England comes out fighting in media storm over data sharing around GP appointments

A letter from NHS England to EMIS Health, a firm that supplies software to GP surgeries, reveals plans to extract data around millions of patients' GP appointments within the next couple of months.

Whilst some media outlets have claimed that the data will include personally identifiable information - which has provoked an outcry among privacy campaigners since neither GPs nor their patients have been consulted over the plans - NHS England has rebutted the criticism, claiming that only top level information will be involved.

An NHS England spokesperson said: "It is crucial not to misunderstand what is being proposed. We are not talking about individual personal information in this letter. What we are referring to is overall statistics for GP surgeries on issues such as total numbers of appointments. Practices have asked us if we could secure more help from the system suppliers in auditing their data so as to reduce their costs and workload.

"Such information is clearly needed to ensure the £125m is wisely invested through the Prime Minister's GP Access Fund [a fund first announced in 2013 to help improve access to GPs]. To repeat, there is no question whatsoever of patients' personal information being shared with NHS England."

NHS England says that it has no yet collected any information under these plans, and the letter, relied on by the Daily Mail for its story, was part of a discussion with its suppliers around how they could work with GP practices.

Computing understands that NHS England now plans to work with GP surgeries to support them in collecting the information needed about appointments. This will apparently not include any personal information such as partial postcode or year of birth.

However some privacy advocates are unconvinced. Phil Booth, coordinator of medConfidential, said: "If NHS England thinks a complete list of when and how often you visit the doctor, and who it is that you see, isn't personal information then maybe someone involved should have gone to medical school, rather than politics school.

"With this letter, NHS England has shown it'll prioritise political motivations over patient trust. It quite evidently thinks it's above the law when it comes to the protections around patient data. And it's intentions are clear: route around doctors and patients, trample on every rule of confidentiality, and collect it all."