WRITTEN ON February 28th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Identity, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

Ollie Letwin asked a good question about how the NHS processes people opting out of the centralised health record. Here’s what the Minister might have said

“We quite appreciate, in the light of our recent data cock-ups, that many people will have reservations about signing up to national centralised health records run by the government. That’s fine; they’re entitled to their views. We shall simply make sure that the centralised NHS service we deliver is so safe, so worthwhile and so eminently worthy of trust that in due course they decide they want to sign up.

“In the meantime we’ll respect their wishes and continue to offer them the best service we can. Oh, and if they choose to sign up with a personal health information provider (such as Google or Microsoft) we’ll make sure our interfaces can interoperate with these systems as standards emerge. After all, by looking after their own records, they’re saving us money and effort, aren’t they, and getting exactly what they want. In fact, it’s really quite a good idea.”

You can see what Ben Bradshaw did say here. For some reason he just waffled, perhaps hoping the question will go away. But it wont, because the alternatives to centralised NHS records are going to be getting better so fast.

Because they’re politicians, they seem to assume that anything that opposes them is “politically motivated”. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that there are people who don’t give a damn about the politics of it all. We just want to be responsible for our own data, and to be treated with respect, as if our wishes mattered. Not to spend life going through some bureaucratic mincing machine with the sand of don’tcareist incompetence scattered liberally through its delicate workings.