NHS England plans to hand over medical records to high-street retailers [UPDATED]
Boots, Tesco and Superdrug to be given access to medical records to 'improve' pharmacy efficiency
NHS England is at the centre of yet another patient confidentiality scandal after drawing up plans to allow major retail chains that run pharmacies access to patients' medical records.
NHS England claims that, following a trial involving 140 pharmacies, the move will reduce pressure on GP surgeries and help improve efficiency. Pharmacies could, for example, provide repeat prescriptions for patients, bypassing GP surgeries. The national rollout will start in the autumn.
However, campaigners say that NHS England is planning to forge ahead with the scheme without even consulting patients first and claim that the information could be mis-appropriated by the retailers to cross-sell other products. Indeed, NHS England has already expanded pharmacists' rights to access patient records from prescriptions to precautionary "health checks".
MedConfidential campaigner Phil Booth described NHS England's blasé attitude towards the confidentiality of NHS patient records as "extraordinary" and warned that the retailers involved in the scheme would find the temptation to use the information in other ways "irresistible".
"It is just extraordinary: to roll out a national programme on the basis of 15 responses from patients, some of whom are very likely to have been negative about it. Fifteen people out of 60 million? That's not an evidence base for a national policy; that is an exercise in manipulation," Booth told the Telegraph.
"These are commercial organisations, large chains, who are looking for opportunities to make money," he added. "If you give them access to all this medical information it is irresistible to them to use it, it doesn't matter if you try to ban it."
The British Medical Association has also come out against the scheme until patients have been fully informed about NHS England's plans.
Under NHS England's plans, summary care records, which include details of all medications prescribed as well as GPs' notes, will be exported to the major pharmacy chains. Pharmacists will need only patients' "permission to view" in order to access the data.
The pilot schemes took place in Somerset, Northampton, North Derbyshire, Sheffield and West Yorkshire between September 2014 and March 2015. The pilot included not just major pharmacy chains, but also independent pharmacists. Almost 2,000 patient records were accessed during the pilot project, according to NHS England's report.
Not surprisingly, the report found that pharmacists were almost entirely in favour, but it also admitted to confusion over getting consent from patients first.
"The principles around asking patients for permission to view their summary care record and its practical application for some prevalent patient groups in the pharmacy setting caused confusion and uncertainty," the report notes.
NHS England and the Health and Social Care Information Centre, however, have played down the claims.
In a statement, it said that patients would have to provide "explicit consent" and that patients' summary care records would only be viewable by "a regulated healthcare professional" in a pharmacy. "This information is not accessible by other means and will never be available to supermarkets for other purposes, such as marketing," claimed the HSCIC in a statement.
It continued: "The information can only be accessed through a secure, encrypted private network by authorised, regulated pharmacy professionals who have been carefully granted a pin-protected access card."
It also claimed that access to the summary care records is monitored "to make sure they are appropriate and are only made for patients when there is a clinical need".