[This blog post now has its own page in the ‘For patients’ section.]

While brave GPs are being bullied into handing over your family’s medical records, we’re hearing from a growing stream of people that their GP practice hasn’t even known what to do when they asked or went in to opt out of care.data.

We’ve been sent scans and photos of Summary Care Record opt out forms that people have been given, forms for opting out of local data sharing arrangements, and who knows what. We can point individual patients who contact us at the right form, but that doesn’t help everyone else in the practice.

If you have gone to your GP practice and they haven’t clearly understood and acted upon your request to opt out of care.data, you can let us know which practice it was through our new tool:

http://formFix.medConfidential.org

Just enter your postcode, tell us which surgery, and we’ll send them some details.

The formFix site is not for you to opt out online, but it lets us know where the confusion is and helps us to help GPs avoid breaching the Data Protection Act because of the impossible position NHS England has put them in.

NHS England has no way of knowing this information, so blithely continues assuring people that everything is fine. This should provide some data on how badly their communications campaign is actually going on the ground, for the next time Tim Kelsey joins us on the radio.

It would really help if you told friends and family who live in different parts of England – care.data does not affect Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland – about this; send them the link, Tweet it, post it on Facebook.

Spread the word.