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Forwarding fyi You may have just had an innocuous looking white green and blue leaflet through the door which tells you that the NHS would like to 'share' your medical records with researchers and selected other parties. It is not addressed to you, is not sent by your GP and looks like junk mail. It all sounds as if it is no more than the sharing of perhaps GP records with your consultants, but it goes way beyond this. The government plans to use only semi-anonymised data uploaded from our GP records to pass on (and sell) to charities, researchers and commercial companies. Unless you opt out, you are deemed to be in, though no opt out letter has been included on the leaflet and you are told to discuss with your doctor if you have concerns. There is a simpler way which I urge you to take: go to http://medconfidential.org which tells you more about this scheme and gives you an opt-out letter + form to download which you can simply fill in and post to your GP. Data will start to be uploaded from GP data in March and once it has been uploaded, your opt-out rights have ended. ****************************************************** Please note that if you press the 'Reply' button your message will go only to the sender of this message. If you want to reply to the whole list, use your mailer's 'Reply-to-All' button to send your message automatically to [log in to unmask] Disclaimer: The messages sent to this list are the views of the sender and cannot be assumed to be representative of the range of views held by subscribers to the Radical Statistics Group. To find out more about Radical Statistics and its aims and activities and read current and past issues of our newsletter you are invited to visit our web site www.radstats.org.uk. *******************************************************