The government is about to resurrect the privatisation of our medical records, but this time without even telling us.

The government review into the care.data scheme was published earlier this month and it recommended the scheme we fought so hard against be scrapped. This sounds like a victory, but buried in the report is a new worrying scheme to sell our medical records to big corporations.

The government’s review proposes to allow our medical records from your family doctor, (possibly including our NHS Numbers, diagnoses, referrals, prescriptions along with our post codes and date of birth) to be uploaded to a giant national database -- but this time without telling us or asking for our consent!

One of the schemes to replace care.data is called the “Single GP dataset”. The government’s review into care.data proposes to send all patient records from family GPs to the central database without the express consent of patients. Once in the system, it can be “sold” to any customers of the ‘Health and Social Care Information centre”, including private companies.

The government buried this announcement on the day of the report into the Iraq War. It is hoping no one will notice this new land grab on our medical records. We can’t allow the government to sneak out the same medical record data scheme under a different name.

Our community successfully fought the original care.data scheme. Thanks to the power of our community we rose up and forced the government to backtrack and ultimately scrap the scheme. Now the government is hoping to flog off our medical records, but this time under a new name and without those pesky safeguards. We have to act to stop the privatisation of our medical records.