Now Tesco has access to your medical records
CHEMISTS are to be granted access to medical records in a move that privacy campaigners said may expose patients to aggressive marketing tactics.
Health officials will allow pharmacies such as Boots, Tesco and Superdrug to see NHS patient data from this autumn in a bid to improve efficiency and boost care standards.
But privacy campaigners said the mass of potentially valuable data would be ‘irresistible’ to giant providers of pharmacy services. Critics also said that the move had been approved without sufficient consultation, after drawing on the opinions of only 15 NHS patients.
Last night, NHS England moved to reassure the public, saying that data protection legislation effectively bans the use of medical records for commercial gain.
The scheme was piloted across 140 pharmacies between September 2013 and March this year, creating ‘significant benefits’, they said. But the sample size of patients was so tiny it had to be discounted, The Telegraph reported.
A report on the pilot scheme found 92 per cent of chemists thought that being granted access to the information had improved their ability to serve patients, with 96 per cent saying it helped them to meet their patients’ needs.
But the report authors were forced to exclude feedback from chemist customers, writing: ‘ For the patient questionnaire, very few results have been received (15). As a consequence they have not been taken into account in the high level benefits results.’
Phil Booth, from campaign group med-Confidential, said: ‘ This approach to medical confidential-
‘Exercise in manipulation’
ity is corroding trust in the NHS. 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.
‘These are commercial organisations, large chains, who are looking for opportunities to make money. 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.’
A spokesman for NHS England said: ‘Pharmacists can only use information for the offering of clinical service to patients. They are bound by the same terms of service and regulations as with their access to any other information. Pharmacists are regulated by the General Pharmaceutical Society and must comply with the Data Protection Act.’ Tesco and Superdrug also both pointed to data protection legislation, saying this effectively ruled out using medical records for marketing purposes.
A Tesco spokesman said: ‘We would never use summary care records or prescription data to market to customers.’
Superdrug said: ‘Patient care is our highest priority. All team members who work in our pharmacies have completed enhanced data protection training to ensure sensitive personal data is handled appropriately. We do not subject patients to sales pressure based on prescription records and this will not change when the Summary Care Record is rolled out.’