Thursday 13 August 2009

Distroyed Data and Swine Flu

This morning has brought 2 issues, More deaths due to the misdiagnosis of Swine Flu and the Police wanting more control over our information.

The news of a mother who died from meningitis when it was misdiagnosed as swine flu over the phone is another tragic example of the state the current has gotten the NHS in to. Where under trained staff man phones, and pretty much everything is classed as swine flu.

The result of this is people are told not to leave their home and too avoid contact with others, this has caused several deaths, with one sixteen year old dying from Tonsillitis, something that I have not heard of killing anyone in the UK in recent years. Now rather than seeing a doctor the NHS has been gotten in to the state where you call a call centre and someone reads questions and diagnosis off the screen, the same way you would with IT support. I have never found this worked particularly well in IT, so I doubt it performs in health issues either.

After a comment in an American paper saying if he was British and used the NHS he would have died, Dr Stephen Hawkin spoke out saying he has received most of his medical support on the NHS - I wonder if he would get the same level of service today he did then, or whether we would loose one of the worlds most brilliant minds.

A shake up of the funding and structure of the NHS is desperately required, not just with the IT budget the way the Conservatives suggest but across the board, the Conservatives put accountants in charge rather than doctors and this has caused a huge degradation of the system, what is needed is a hybrid where you have mangers dealing with the business issues at the behest of doctors rather than telling the doctors that more cleaning staff would cost too much money and the occasional case of MRSA is a reasonable risk when offset against the cost. Tell that to the patients who's lives are ruined by it.

Also in the news is a piece of software that causes data on the internet to 'self destruct' after a specific period of time, after which no one can recover it.

The Police don't like this, note I said Police not the security services, the Police are supposed to be there to protect us, but more and more this comes from limiting our freedoms and keeping us under close surveillance. The assumption is we are guilty till we prove to them otherwise.

The comment from a police forensics expert is that it that data should work like the police being able to enter a persons home and search. If this is the case though I can shred or burn any correspondence I don't want others to see so Vanish would actually be supplying what he is asking for (somthing I doubt anyone has pointed out to him).

The more we become reliant on the internet and data, the more we need the ability to protect our selves, not just from 'Over enthusiastic policing' but from hackers and criminals wanting to use this against us.

Should the Liberal Democrats get in to power, privacy and human rights are high on the agenda, not only with plans to protect the privacy of the individual, and to implement a permanent right to privacy in a bill of rights, but increasing the rights of the victim rather than the criminal.

The world we are heading towards is a very scary place where our every movement is monitored by the government in case we do something wrong, the Liberal Democrats will not only move direction away from this, by try and prevent future governments from heading in that direction again, giving us what I see as our only chance to keep Britain as a free nation.

No comments: