National Data Guardian / Caldicott

On August 30, the UK government published a report by Professor Sir John Bell of Oxford University providing a number of recommendations to government to ensure the long term success of the life sciences sector in the UK (Life Sciences Industry Strategy).  This blog post summarises the key recommendations and observations made from

The UK Government has opened a consultation, running until September 7, 2016, regarding how UK National Health Service (NHS) patient data should be safeguarded, and how it could be used for purposes other than direct care (e.g. scientific research).

The consultation comes after two parallel-track reviews of information governance and data security arrangements in the NHS found a number of shortcomings, described below.  The  Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the National Data Guardian (NDG, led by Dame Fiona Caldicott) made a range of recommendations, including new security standards, stronger inspection and enforcement around security lapses and re-identification of anonymized patient data, and an eight-point process around assuming and respecting patient consent decisions.

Following the public consultation, the new security standards could eventually be required and audited by government inspectors from the CQC, and imposed under revised standard NHS England contract terms.  CQC inspectors could potentially act on tip-offs from NHS Digital (formerly known as the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre, ‘HSCIC’).  Those tip-offs could be based on low scores obtained by organizations in their annual NHS Information Governance Toolkit (IGT) self-assessments.  The IGT, which the reviewers said should be redesigned, applies both to NHS bodies and their commercial vendors.

The new consent model, meanwhile, could provide more streamlined, system-wide consents for use of patient data for purposes including quality assurance and research.

The CQC and the NDG’s findings and twenty-four recommendations were jointly presented in a covering letter to the UK government, available here, and fuller reports, available here and here (CQC and NDG, respectively).  This post provides a brief summary of their main findings and recommendations.  For the consultation questions themselves, see here.
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