A £1 million advertising campaign has been launched by NHS England to raise public awareness of care.data.
Throughout January, all 22 million households in England will receive a leaflet explaining how the new system will work and the benefits the government claims it will bring, while setting out how the information will be used and the right to pull out of the plan.
Care.data is a programme which will pull patient information from general practice in an attempt to improve the safety and care of patients.
A £1 million advertising campaign has been launched by NHS England to raise public awareness of care.data.
Throughout January, all 22 million households in England will receive a leaflet explaining how the new system will work and the benefits the government claims it will bring, while setting out how the information will be used and the right to pull out of the plan.
Care.data is a programme which will pull patient information from general practice in an attempt to improve the safety and care of patients.
NHS England hopes that information from care.data will allow NHS organisations to plan and design services better.
Tim Kelsey, NHS England's director of patients and information said: “This programme will give NHS commissioners a more complete picture of the safety and quality of services in their local area, which will lead to improvements to patient outcomes.
“To do this, we will need to link data. The system is designed to be extremely secure, with a suite of safeguards to protect confidentiality. But we know not everyone will feel comfortable and we want to make sure they know they have the right to say 'no'. Patient confidentiality is non-negotiable.”
The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has been charged with extracting the data from GP practices and hospitals. The data will be brought together by the HSCIC, which will then make the information available, stripped of patient identifiable data.
Kingsley Manning, HSCIC chair said: “Valuable feedback from doctors and members of the public has led us to decide to take this more slowly, in order to support GPs in discussing this with patients and to ensure the public in general is aware.
“We cannot achieve this transformation in enhanced knowledge of the effectiveness of health treatments without public support and understanding.”
