Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 4:50 pm on 21 February 2008.
No, we do not keep records on such individual cases. If we were required to be informed of every single small piece of disciplinary activity that was taken in the whole of the health service or minor breaches of data security, it would not only overwhelm the Department but the health service itself. However, there is a requirement on the health service locally to inform strategic health authorities of serious breaches of data security. Indeed, that is how a number of breaches recently came to light—most of them had already been in the public domain for some time, but they were only publicised more widely because of the recent interest in this subject following the data issues with Revenue and Customs.
Moving on to the issues raised by Dr. Taylor, he wanted more detail about how the IT roll-out was going. I can tell him that five out of the six primary care trusts involved have started informing the public. They are Bolton, Bury, Dorset, South Birmingham and Bradford and Airedale. As of
The hon. Member for Wyre Forest asked about Bolton PCT in particular. It has issued 270,000 letters to patients, and 0.9 per cent. of the patients who were asked opted out of having their summary care record uploaded. Some 94,000 records have been created on the NHS national care records spine. Three or four unscheduled care settings can view the summary care records. Two of them are the accident and emergency department and the walk-in centre, and there is also the GP out-of-hours service, so good progress has been made there.