Home held physiotherapy notes

The body responsible for information technology in the NHS, Connecting for Health, has announced that they will be running a trial study of giving patients access to computerised versions of their hospital records from home. This seems further evidence of the loss of direction with the NHS information technology programme. It sound a really nice idea to be able to look up records from home but it seems a bit of a waste of time.It's going to make little or no difference to patient care and carries with it a huge security threat. It will be only a matter of time before a determined person will compromise the security of the system and confidential records will be available to unauthorised people. There's also an issue with the rules being changed (all in the interests of national security of course) whereby the police and other government agencies will be allowed to access the computer to find people or get personal details. If this is linked with some sort of pin number or swipe card which will have to be used every time a patient sees their doctor or goes to hospital then we will always be under survailence. It will be interesting to see how this move could affect physiotherapy records and record keeping in general. It will "dumb down" records because in effect they will be on display to patients and it will force further changes in attitude to documentation. The one ray of hope is that at present it will be possible to "opt out" of the system. No one has clearly explained how the computerisation of records will be an advantage. The idea of any member of a healthcare team being able to access the record is good but that has to be offset against the inevitable paralysis of the health system on those days the computer system fails combined with the massive costs in setting up and running plus the security risk. It looks like the people who initiated this have been so seduced by the technolgy that they have lost sight of its purpose.