Today lawyers acting for openDemocracy and five other claimants have challenged the British government’s controversial plans to extract the medical records of everyone in England from their GP without proper consultation or informed consent – just as the doctors are reeling from coping with COVID-19.
openDemocracy has joined forces with Foxglove, a tech justice start-up, and other campaigners to issue an urgent legal challenge to the Department of Health and Social Care over its scheme to harvest the personal medical data into one massive database, which private corporations will be able to access.
The coalition’s legal letter to the government warns that unless the health department pauses the GP data grab – due to go ahead on 1 July – and seeks transparent patient consent, we will seek a court injunction to halt the scheme.
