MTAS and other NHS websites

[Mary Hawking]

>Peter Tomlinson wrote:
>>  (A note about data errors: my local health centre has the incorrect 
>>spelling for the name of my street - not an alternative, just wrong: 
>>there is a letter missing from the name. Asked to correct it, they 
>>said they cannot. Will I thus become a non-person when the data gets 
>>uploaded  to the big database?)
>>
>
>It will be especially entertaining for people whose Spine records are 
>mistakenly labelled "deceased".

But there is another problem here: how do records get labelled as 
"deceased" on the Spine?
PDS - which only applies to England and Wales - now contains 72million 
*live* records - according to the PAC hearings - and the population of 
England and Wales is considerably less than that!
I know that you can be officially or unofficially dead - but the rules 
*do* seem to be a bit vague for getting on - and off - in the first 
place!

>Not only will they not be able to get any more NHS treatment, but their 
>demise will be communicated to DWP who will stop their benefits and 
>pensions and cancel their NI cards so that they can't work. DVLA will 
>have to be told, so that their driving licenses can be suspended. HMRC 
>in turn will be informed and will freeze all relevant bank accounts. 
>Their ID cards will of course be cancelled as a matter of routine.

We have been assured that PDS will *not* be linked to other databases: I 
suspect that, once the PDS situation is examined, social services, DWP 
and DVLA will flatly refuse to have any cross-linking at all!

>
>After that there won't be any way for them to complain that a mistake 
>has been made, because the National Identity Register system is 
>designed to reject complaints apparently coming from a deceased person. 
>And no-one else can complain on their behalf, because that would be 
>against the Data Protection Act.
>
>The unfortunate non-citizen will then have to go and live on roots and 
>berries in the woods. Like Doc Daneeka in "Catch 22".
>
>--
>Pete Mitchell

Mary Hawking
-- 
Mary Hawking