The Department for Health and Social Care said the change would “transform what is possible when it comes to diagnosing, treating and preventing a vast range of diseases like cancer, dementia and arthritis,” and “relieve individual GP practices of the administrative burden” of needing to share each participants’ data individually.
POLITICO reported in November that the Joint GP IT Committee, comprising representatives from the British Medical Association (BMA) and Royal College of General Practitioners, had declined to give its blessing to the change amid concerns about potential impact on patient trust.
The doctors’ groups were worried that the patients who donated their data would not be properly notified to get their consent to send the data elsewhere.
At the time, DHSC maintained that doctors’ groups had been properly consulted. “We are committed to implementing this direction in line with patients’ explicit consent for their data to be used in research,” a DHSC spokesperson said in November.