The general public may have been rudely awakened by Donald Trump’s recent vacillations about whether the NHS is “on the table” in trade talks, but a perfect storm around the NHS and NHS patients’ data in particular has been building for some time.
As OurNHS Editor Caroline Molloy and Philip Aldrick, Economics Editor of The Times, have both laid out, simplistic notions of privatisation in service delivery fail to attend to the really juicy NHS trade targets – which are patients’ data, drugs, and devices (the latter including much of what’s currently referred to as ‘apps’ and ‘AI’).
The “negotiating objectives” for a UK trade deal, published by the White House in February 2019, make it abundantly clear what the US is seeking: “...[patients’] data access, powers to use that data under its own laws, full intellectual property protection for its algorithms and an unrestricted market in which to sell the final product.”
