|
ID cards: the truth
Related issues |
News /
Government wants medical data on Identity Register - against BMA advice23 April 2006 Don't fall for this nonsensical government attempt to sugar-coat the ID cards scheme. Read on to learn why linking vital medical information to ID cards is not really a beneficial idea. They'll try things like this to make us believe that really it's all for our own good, in order to disguise the truth: identity registration will be immensely useful for the government to check up on & track us all, while we will suffer the cost, the cock-ups and the loss of freedom & privacy There is already a donor card scheme. You can get bracelets or tags engraved with information about your allergies & medical conditions. WE DON'T NEED ID CARDS. From IDENTITY cards are to carry medical details, despite repeated government assurances that concerns about privacy meant it would not happen.
A minister at the Home Office disclosed it wants people to put personal health information on the cards to give doctors information for emergencies.
Card-holders will be urged to volunteer details of blood group, allergies, and whether they wish to donate organs. Ministers stressed there would be no compulsion.
Andy Burnham, a junior Home Office minister with responsibility for promoting ID cards, said there was an “impressive benefits case” for use of the cards by the NHS.
Health information about individuals would be kept on the central identity card database, and would not be visible on the cards themselves.
Pressure groups condemned the move as “function creep”, while the British Medical Association (BMA) said it was “sceptical” of the benefits.
Notice the contradiction in what the Home Office says - the medical information would be on the database not on the card itself, yet they envisage that ambulance crew & doctors would use the cards to access such information in an emergency - are all ambulances going to be fitted out with expensive card readers that link up to the central Identity Register? That would be impractical, unreliable, and a waste of money. Medical staff simply would not rely on ID card information in such life & death situations. Spyblog points out:that ambulance crews are equipped to easily test for blood types, that there is a £30 billion pound NHS database already that is supposed to provide your up-to-date information to medical staff who treat you, and that the British Medical Association explained all this to the to the Home Affairs Select Committee on identity cards in 2004: Dr Chisholm: "Our wish is that such [medical] information should be excluded. Why? Not least because we would want the public to be reassured that other people who had access to their identity card were not able to access personal health information. I think that will be, irrespective of technological solutions, a genuine fear in terms of public perception. I think that, as Dr Nathanson has said, it is possible that the ID card might in some way help to link to the electronic patient record in terms of healthcare professionals who have a need to know information, but I think that our preference would be basically to keep the two systems separate and not to include medical information."
and Dr Nathanson: "If you are knocked down by a bus and [the card] just said that you were ABO group, which is the common blood group, they would not in fact give you that without actually checking it. It takes seconds to check ABO group and what actually happens that takes longer in the lab is far more complex than that and, although I have been a blood donor for many years, I do not know all those complex bits about my own. So, it is unlikely that you would actually have that information for most people. We would have concerns, for example, about allergies. Let us say that it said on your card that you had no allergies and it had not been updated—and I think cards often will not be updated—and then perhaps you might have become seriously allergic to something fairly recently. I think doctors would be reluctant to rely upon information on a card that was not constantly updated. The point about the national electronic health record is that every time you see a doctor or other healthcare worker, it will be updated and it may in the future also, I hope, have patients able to input data as well so that we really do mean that it is a real time record of what is happening in the patient's life in health terms."
|
NO2ID campaign Defy ID network |
