Privacy campaigners will be screaming "I told you so" at anybody who will listen, following the news that the police are to be given access to the national children's database to look for evidence of crime outside its original remit of protecting children.
Function creep seems to be an inevitable feature of such databases. No matter how much trust and goodwill they destroy in the process, ministers just cannot help themselves when the police - and then other authorities - suggest they should be able to have a look around for evidence of serious wrongdoing - which then becomes less and less serious.
Did Patricia Greenhalgh understand this when, following an ethnographic study of the first NHS summary care records pilots, she suggested that NHS Connecting for Health should review its consent model and its "do not create" option?
That patients do care who has access to their records has become very clear in the Wirral, where the primary care trust has got into hot water for trying to pass patient data onto a private company to run a telephone advice campaign. Another interesting aspect of the case: a privately-run coaching service is bang in line with national policy on long-term conditions; but local people don't seem to have recognised it as NHS business.
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