Letters
We welcome all readers’ letters, but reserve the right to edit them or withhold names and addresses. Please email: [email protected]
Please keep letters to a maximum of 150 words, and include your full name, address and a daytime telephone number
If registration fees are going to be increased, so should our pay It is depressing beyond belief to read that the Nursing and Midwifery Council looks set to increase the annual registration fee from £100 to £120 from March 2015 (News February 5). It is only a year since the fee rose from £76 to £100 to cope with the rising cost of fitness to practise referrals. If the fee does rise to £120 a year, this will amount to an increase of almost 60 per cent in two years. Fitness to practise is becoming a bottomless and expensive black hole. The number of referrals continues to rise inexorably, as does the cost of the hearings. We are all paying the price. I agree with Unite professional officer for regulation Jane Beach that the government needs to look at what it could do to make registration more affordable to nurses. Fitness to practise would be the obvious place to start. If registration fees go up, so should our pay. We have had enough of pay freezes, the rising cost of living and paying exorbitant registration fees to the NMC in order to be able to work. Mandy Millar, Stockport
OUR CONSENT ON THE SHARING OF RECORDS SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED Thank you for the insightful correspondence on the sharing of data from patient records with researchers (Letters January 22 and February 5) and the option of withholding consent to the sharing of this information. There is no clarity or transparency about the ownership of this information or who has control of the data and access to the material. It could all be made available to whoever is prepared to pay the most for it. Why are we being asked to sign away the rights to our medical history without knowing who is going to use it and for what purposes? Rather than
having to write to our GPs and formally request that we opt out of the sharing of this information, we should be invited to opt in to these arrangements. Our consent should never be assumed. JB Winger, Leeds
PATIENT CONCERN IS ALL FOR DATA SHARING, BUT FIRST GET CONSENT Because we at Patient Concern have objected to our most intimate medical details being routinely released to third parties, we have been accused of taking an anti-research line (Letters February 5). We support data sharing to improve patient care, but only if explicit consent has first been sought. As patients, we disclose our most sensitive details to our GPs on the basis that these will not get into the wrong hands. We expect our records to remain confidential unless we give permission for their release. The Information Commissioner’s Office has indicated that the efforts of NHS England to publicise the new
cara.data patient records database are totally inadequate. Healthwatch England chair Anna Bradley has demanded that the project be delayed to allow time for patients to be properly informed. This comes after NHS England started a mass leaflet mail-out to every household explaining the project and giving people the chance to opt out. Oxford GP Gordon Gancz faces having his practice shut down after promising to opt all of his patients out of the scheme to harvest their medical records. He was told he would be in breach of his contract if he did not automatically opt his patients in to it. Keeping patients in the dark and bullying GPs is conduct we would expect to find in a dictatorship, not a democracy. Joyce Robins, co-director, Patient Concern
COMMUNITY HEALTH COUNCILS WERE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN HEALTHWATCH It would have been great if health secretary Jeremy Hunt had marked the
34 february 12 :: vol 28 no 24 :: 2014 NURSING STANDARD Downloaded from RCNi.com by ${individualUser.displayName} on Nov 19, 2015. For personal use only. No other uses without permission. Copyright © 2015 RCNi Ltd. All rights reserved.
We welcome all readers’ letters, but reserve the right to edit them or withhold names and addresses. Please email: [email protected]
Please keep letters to a maximum of 150 words, and include your full name, address and a daytime telephone number
If registration fees are going to be increased, so should our pay It is depressing beyond belief to read that the Nursing and Midwifery Council looks set to increase the annual registration fee from £100 to £120 from March 2015 (News February 5). It is only a year since the fee rose from £76 to £100 to cope with the rising cost of fitness to practise referrals. If the fee does rise to £120 a year, this will amount to an increase of almost 60 per cent in two years. Fitness to practise is becoming a bottomless and expensive black hole. The number of referrals continues to rise inexorably, as does the cost of the hearings. We are all paying the price. I agree with Unite professional officer for regulation Jane Beach that the government needs to look at what it could do to make registration more affordable to nurses. Fitness to practise would be the obvious place to start. If registration fees go up, so should our pay. We have had enough of pay freezes, the rising cost of living and paying exorbitant registration fees to the NMC in order to be able to work. Mandy Millar, Stockport
OUR CONSENT ON THE SHARING OF RECORDS SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED Thank you for the insightful correspondence on the sharing of data from patient records with researchers (Letters January 22 and February 5) and the option of withholding consent to the sharing of this information. There is no clarity or transparency about the ownership of this information or who has control of the data and access to the material. It could all be made available to whoever is prepared to pay the most for it. Why are we being asked to sign away the rights to our medical history without knowing who is going to use it and for what purposes? Rather than
having to write to our GPs and formally request that we opt out of the sharing of this information, we should be invited to opt in to these arrangements. Our consent should never be assumed. JB Winger, Leeds
PATIENT CONCERN IS ALL FOR DATA SHARING, BUT FIRST GET CONSENT Because we at Patient Concern have objected to our most intimate medical details being routinely released to third parties, we have been accused of taking an anti-research line (Letters February 5). We support data sharing to improve patient care, but only if explicit consent has first been sought. As patients, we disclose our most sensitive details to our GPs on the basis that these will not get into the wrong hands. We expect our records to remain confidential unless we give permission for their release. The Information Commissioner’s Office has indicated that the efforts of NHS England to publicise the new
cara.data patient records database are totally inadequate. Healthwatch England chair Anna Bradley has demanded that the project be delayed to allow time for patients to be properly informed. This comes after NHS England started a mass leaflet mail-out to every household explaining the project and giving people the chance to opt out. Oxford GP Gordon Gancz faces having his practice shut down after promising to opt all of his patients out of the scheme to harvest their medical records. He was told he would be in breach of his contract if he did not automatically opt his patients in to it. Keeping patients in the dark and bullying GPs is conduct we would expect to find in a dictatorship, not a democracy. Joyce Robins, co-director, Patient Concern
COMMUNITY HEALTH COUNCILS WERE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN HEALTHWATCH It would have been great if health secretary Jeremy Hunt had marked the
34 february 12 :: vol 28 no 24 :: 2014 NURSING STANDARD Downloaded from RCNi.com by ${individualUser.displayName} on Nov 19, 2015. For personal use only. No other uses without permission. Copyright © 2015 RCNi Ltd. All rights reserved.
