UK prepares to open up Covid-era data despite doctors’ fears – POLITICO

A group of doctors warned the government that the move could erode patient confidence. While management says the government will get patients’ consent to share data more broadly, doctors’ groups are concerned that this won’t happen in practice and that patients won’t know their data is being funneled to other studies.

NHS England has been in talks with the GP IT Joint Committee, which is made up of representatives from the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), about the data, a person close to the talks told POLITICO.

The DHSC confirmed it had been in dialogue with doctors’ groups and a spokesperson said it had delayed signing the directive to address doctors’ concerns.

The JGPITC argued that it has not been adequately consulted about the change in accordance with established governance processes, and that reusing the data set without asking patients’ permission risks damaging already fragile public trust in the profession, the same person said.

It comes after the same group of doctors lodged a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office in June, alleging that NHS England had breached data protection law by train a general purpose AI model in the same data set without consent. The disagreement also sits in the wider context of a long-running dispute between the government and the BMA over doctors’ pay and working conditions.

DHSC maintains that proper processes have been followed. “As the Secretary of State made clear last year during his speech to the Royal College of GPs in October 2024, we are committed to implementing this direction in line with patients’ explicit consent for their data to be used in research,” a DHSC spokesperson said.