I WOULD like to take this opportunity to express my concerns and to warn others, about the forthcoming data mining of personal medical information by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) under the auspices of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, known as care.data.

This act makes it a legal requirement for GP surgeries to provide non-anonymised patient data to a central database to be administered by the private French company ATOS, which has come in for much criticism over its mishandling of the infamous Work Capability Assessment for sick and disabled people.

An excellent resource for those, like myself, particularly concerned about their private medical data being utilised for commercial purposes, including insurance reasons, can be found at http://care-data.info/">http://care-data.info/ .

This website has been put together by a concerned GP, Dr Neil Bhatia, a GP and Caldicott Guardian in Hampshire.

Courier readers may be aware that the NHS has already released millions of hospital records, which were sold to a private actuarial company which then uploaded the records to Google.

It should also be noted that almost half of GPs in England have opted themselves and their families out of the scheme, including local GPs.

Jennifer Hynes

Lapford

By email

Footnote: Jennifer's letter follows Nora Parminter's article, "Views on the News" (Courier February 28) in which she referred to the launching an NHS database which has been postponed until the autumn.