NHS closures approach challenged
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Questions are being raised about the NHS's ability to push ahead with plans to close services.
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The head of the U.K. National Health Service has defended plans to build a centralized database of patient records following another embarrassing loss of personal information by the government.The U.K. Department of Health admitted this weekend that nine of its regional NHS trusts have reported losing patient data. One of the trusts, the City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, in east London, lost the medical records for about 160,000 children, according to newspaper reports. The total number of records has not been disclosed.The losses emerged as part of a wider review following similar government blunders, and have revived questions about the security of building a centralized patient records database, part of the U.K.&#39;s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). But David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, said the project is essential and should go ahead.&quot;It&#39;s vitally important that when a doctor is sitting in front of a patient they have all the information they need at their fingertips, and that&#39;s what&#39;s been driving us through all this,&quot; Nicholson told BBC Radio 4&#39;s Today program on Monday.The proposed system will not be a single large records database, but a series of interconnected regional databases, he said. And the security system will be more rigorous than that used with most Internet banking systems, according to Nicholson.&quot;You&#39;d need a user name, a password and a smart card [to access patient records] and you would have role-controlled access,&quot; he said. &quot;So a nurse on a ward with a smart card and a password could only access a relatively small number of patient records.&quot;The information that was reported lost over the weekend was encrypted and so not vulnerable to misuse, Nicholson said.But Ross Anderson, a security expert at the University of Cambridge, told Radio 4 that whether the data is encrypted is not the main issue.&quot;One of the questions you have to ask here is not whether the data was encrypted or password protected, but why someone was able to have access to 160,000 children&#39;s records,&quot; he said. &quot;In private industry ... if someone tried to make off with hundreds of thousands of records the alarms would sound.&quot;Opposition leaders pounced on the latest misstep as evidence that the Labour government can&#39;t be trusted with its citizens&#39; data. They called for further studies to show how the proposed patient records system would protect privacy.The incident comes after the U.K.&#39;s HM Revenue and Customs lost personal records for 25 million Britons, and the Driving Standards Agency lost records for more than 3 million learner drivers.&quot;The power of technology means it can be very easy to use the information, but also very easy to lose the information,&quot; the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said on the Today program. &quot;The events of the last few weeks have woken up everybody to the importance of taking these matters seriously.&quot;&#160;
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Concerns about safety and the care of dying patients dominate complaints to an NHS watchdog.
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The NHS is to come under pressure to weed out ineffective and obsolete treatments, by the drugs watchdog.
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Campaigners for village schools say hundreds face closure because of government pressure.
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Ministers are to put pressure on family doctors to extend opening hours, reigniting the GP contract row.
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Parents of children whose primary school was shut aim to help other schools threatened with closure.
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Virulent norovirus has forced at least 70 hospital wards across England and Wales to close to new patients.
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A hospital at the centre of Britain's deadliest superbug outbreak today admitted it has been forced to close a ward after an outbreak of a vomiting virus.
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Cross-party group wants to remove delays and need for two doctors to approve terminations.
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Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has cranked up the pressure on GPs to extend their opening hours.
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The health minister says he will see for himself problems which caused A&Es across Wales to shut to all but critical patients.
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An NHS trust chief says the Welsh health service is failing to solve problems after a nurse highlights concerns.
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GPs have discussed quitting the NHS in a row over longer hours, doctors' leaders reveal.
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New watchdog could close hospitals within 24 hours.
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Safety lapses in the NHS caused the deaths of more than 2,000 patients and led to the harm of another 160,000 people over the last year.
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The current wave of university science department closures could put the future of UK medicine at risk by cutting its research capacity, the British Medical Association warns today.