When an NHS data programme starts flailing around, the Department of Health in England asks the National Data Guardian to bail them out.
DH/E’s institutional dysfunction means they expect an NDG Review will tell them that they’re all doing wonderfully; that the defensive and tone deaf staff are right and the rest of the world is wrong. NDG Reviews rarely turn out that way.
The NDG has put out a survey to health and care professionals, supposedly only them, and only about the Single Palantir Record. It closes on Friday 9th October
NHS England has started referring to many things around the Federated Data Platform as being part of the Single Palantir Record and so we’d encourage NHS staff to respond to the NDG survey as if it covered both the FDP and the SPR – because to NHS England, they are now the same thing. Same Senior Responsible Owner, same culture, same software.
The Single Palantir Record will be used to implement the National Online Hospital and redesign care pathways as the NHS zombies on with Wes Streeting’s vision and the Sunak administration’s changes to the scope of patient opt outs (ie allowing DH/E to use data however they wish).
It seems that neither NHS England nor NDG has published a framework for what the survey sits within, so following the precedent that anything not provided is assumed not to exist, we presume there are no Terms of Reference or any jointly agreed framing. As such, the NDG can comment wherever the survey replies and evidence take her.
It would be perverse for the NDG to ask NHS staff for their views, and then to outright ignore them. It may be routine for NHSE to do that, but it is odd for the NDG to. It is equally odd that there appears to be nothing for patients – the FDP/SPR programmes assume they can do things to patients rather than with patients as the programme has chosen to reflect the culture of their tech supplier.
We therefore expect the Review must take a view on the minimum requirements for access to systems already shown as being abused in the ongoing series of scandals exposed by Sky News. NHS England is data controller for the nationally held records of access to systems, and the same staff who institutionally deny any contribution to facilitating such abuses are the same senior staff refusing to change on FDP/SPR. When NHS England claims that such abuses are from a “small minority”, the survey and writeup is a chance to show the scale (the survey doesn’t ask of course, but there are free text boxes). Are they a “small minority”? The survey effectively tells those who aren’t “professionals” working in the NHS that their views don’t matter, but they can have equivalent access to systems.
NHS England continues to burn public credibility on the topics of Privacy, Transparency or Trust as their senior staff hide in Gray meeting rooms, insisting they are right to facilitate the coverup used by creeps, voyeurs and ghouls. After the abolition of NHSE in the Health Bill, there will need to be a leadership and structural reset. DH/E could solve the problem tomorrow by announcing that patients will see how data about them is used, but instead they simply refuse. NHS England wrote two letters, because the first was so woeful. We’d cite the Department of Health’s view, but they seem not to have commented at all. Silence. Curious that…
For its limitations, the survey is important, and if you’re reading this, you should consider filling it out before it closes on Friday 9th October – we have seen no indication that a survey for patients or victims of inappropriate accesses is coming.
Palantir Inc’s Tory-supporting advocacy team will surely be informing employee Tom Watson’s submission. Here’s ours.
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