Lord Freyberg – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Freyberg on 2016-03-17.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they plan to publish a response to their consultation on accredited safe havens, Protecting personal health and care data: a consultation on proposals to introduce new regulations, which closed on 8 August 2014.
Lord Prior of Brampton
The Department received 278 responses to the 2014 consultation Protecting personal health and care data, but was unable to publish the Coalition Government’s response to that consultation before the 2015 election.
The consultation set the clear ambition to move as quickly as possible to a future state where:
– the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) is the place for holding identifiable health and care information at the national level;
– access to data is more automated so that routine functions, including many commissioning functions, do not require access to identifiable data; and
– consent is used more widely as the means for sharing identifiable information.
Analysis of consultation responses demonstrated no obvious consensus about the function, purpose, number and controls required for Accredited Safe Havens (ASHs) to operate. Since the 2014 consultation, HSCIC, working with NHS England, local government, Public Health England and other key stakeholders has committed to the delivery of the future state within two years, without the need for interim ASHs. Delivery of these functions by HSCIC has the added benefits of:
– increasing the likelihood of the public that there are robust protections and safeguards in place for their health and care data and information and;
– reducing the need for the health and care system to use identifiable data as a basis for delivering their functions.
The Government has concluded that the focus should be on supporting the HSCIC and NHS England in taking forward the future state as soon as possible. This will address the need to support integration and, in the longer term, to ensure flexibility is built in to reflect future priorities and also developments in technology and data.
In September 2015, The Secretary of State for Health commissioned the Care Quality Commission to undertake a review of data security in the National Health Service, and in parallel commissioned Dame Fiona Caldicott, the National Data Guardian, to undertake an independent review of data security and consent, to:
– Develop new data security standards;
– Devise a method of testing compliance with the new standards, and;
– Propose a new consent/opt-out model for data sharing.
The National Data Guardian’s independent review will report shortly and the government will consult on the recommendations and respond to them in due course.
