UK Parliament / Open data

Future of the NHS

Proceeding contribution from Margaret Greenwood (Labour) in the House of Commons on Thursday, 23 February 2023. It occurred during Backbench debate on Future of the NHS.

The right hon. Member is being very generous with his time. We all believe that technology is useful, and we all embrace it—of course we do—but data is a different issue, because in situations where both the NHS and the private sector are providing services, people get understandably nervous about their data being shared.

The issue I wanted to raise with the right hon. Member, which follows on from the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), is the percentage of people who do not want to access things through the internet. I had a retired nurse come to see me, saying that she found eConsult—the system for booking a doctor’s appointment—incredibly difficult to use. She was not speaking just for herself; she was worried that many of her friends were no longer going to the doctor because they could not use eConsult. I also remind the right hon. Member that 7 million adults in this country are functionally illiterate, so having a system that is overly reliant on such methods is not going to serve the whole population.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
728 c355 
Session
2022-23
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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