Twenty-three organisations have publicly raised concerns that patients\u2019 new right to have access to their NHS medical records could put domestic abuse survivors at greater risk.<\/p>\n
The main fear is perpetrators may obtain the data by coercing their victim to share access to the website or app. Refuge, one of the organisations which has raised the concerns, described that as perpetrators weaponising information for abuse.<\/p>\n
The charity\u2019s interim CEO Ellen Miller said: \u201cOur message to survivors is simple: call your GP surgery and ask that access to your records be switched off, so that they cannot be viewed in the app.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the British Medical Association\u2019s GP Committee for England, is concerned for some categories of patients.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could be a woman who tells her abusive partner she has a GP appointment when in fact she is seeking support with her domestic situation, a parent whose abusive spouse may use sensitive clinical information to undermine legal cases of custody of dependents in the family courts, patients requesting covert contraception forbidden in their home or relationship, or those disclosing abuse from others who may have access to their smartphone,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Other organisations raising concerns include Surviving Economic Abuse, the Independent Domestic Abuse Services, Respect, Women\u2019s Aid, SafeLives and the Centre for Women\u2019s Justice.<\/p>\n
An NHS England spokesperson said it takes patient safety seriously and worked with organisations representing survivors of domestic abuse over the last 18 months to develop guidance for GP practices to ensure patients can decline access to the information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty-three organisations have publicly raised concerns that patients\u2019 new right to have access to their NHS medical records could put domestic abuse survivors at greater risk. The main fear is perpetrators may obtain the data by coercing their victim to share access to the website or app. Refuge, one of the organisations which has raised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5109,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5108"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5111,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions\/5111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ncdvmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}