No to Privatisation of Patient Information

That the Parliament condemns the Minister for Health and Community Care for agreeing and signing the £300 million private contract for transferring NHS patients’ records to a computer database; is appalled that, despite the experience and failure of a similar privatisation exercise in England, several high-profile government IT contract disasters and little detail in the public domain of how the contract will be managed or be subject to consultation, the minister saw fit to sign NHS patients up to an 11-year contract to store their personal information on one central and one back-up database; believes that the storing of such sensitive data should be subject to public accountability and recognises that this will not be possible under the terms of a commercial contract with a consortium consisting of various multinational companies, such as Atos Origin, BT and IBM; encourages all patients to resist their health information being placed in private hands; supports all those campaigning to fight the increasing privatisation of the NHS and other public services, and looks forward to the day when the Scottish people have a government prepared to stand against the right wing global assault on public services.