Dr Baw said: “[The government] told us that they’re going to spend £480 million on a thing, but they haven’t actually got into any detail about what the thing does. They have made vague suggestions, usually in response to what was in the papers that week.”
This raises a lot of questions regarding the boundaries between the government and the health data gathered by hospitals and local practices.
“I’m a medical doctor and people tell me things in strict confidence, that’s one of the fundamental principles of medicine, it’s in the Hippocratic oath,” explained Dr Baw. “It’s a very dangerous precedent to start saying that certain elements of that data are up for grabs.”
Archive.org: ‘A very dangerous precedent’: doctors share concerns over Palantir bid for NHS England data contract