How does all this sit with the current drive to combat ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among Black, Asian and migrant communities in the UK? Striking quiet deals with firms like Palantir, especially with no real public dialogue, risks demolishing trust in the NHS among the very communities where the government now urgently seeks to shore up trust.
As Kailash Chand, honorary vice president of the British Medical Association, put it: “The secrecy around what the government is doing with NHS data, working with companies like Palantir, will damage what trust is left amongst ethnic communities, for migrants, and in the NHS family as a whole. It makes it difficult for people like me to convince ethnic minority people that this is being done in their best interests.”
The NHS is at a crossroads
This isn’t just about Palantir. The future of the NHS is being written now, in the latest chapter of the pandemic. The government has put us on notice that sweeping changes to our health service are on the way. They present both opportunities and grave risks.
The government has a legal duty to consult us, citizens and NHS users, before they strike massive deals which affect that future. In doing so, they need to take important steps (like conducting ‘data protection impact assessments’) to ensure our health information and our rights are protected. They haven’t done this for the Palantir datastore: that’s why we’re bringing this case.
And our elected leaders need to explain their long-term plans for our cherished NHS – enabling genuine public debate about them.
The government’s published plans for overhauling the NHS include new rules for handling the nation’s health data, and involve handing over almost all power over the NHS to Matt Hancock. By scrapping many NHS procurement rules, they open the door for big tech firms to take ever-greater slices of the NHS pie – including access to our health data for profit, and unaccountable influence over vital healthcare decisions. These are issues in which the public deserves a say.
Our NHS: worth more than a watermelon cocktail
How did we get here? Was it really, as some suggest, that the government suddenly turned to Palantir in an emergency because there was no other choice?
It seems not. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s reporting reveals, Palantir has been intensively lobbying top UK and NHS officials.
On 2 July 2019, the night before the launch party of NHSX – the UK’s flagship digital health initiative – emails released through Freedom of Information show Palantir hosting the chair of NHS England, Lord David Prior, for dinner and cocktails. (Prior is a Conservative peer and former junior minister.)
Palantir’s UK chief, Louis Mosley, emailed his pitch the very next day: “I’m more convinced than ever that the UK is uniquely placed to pioneer the next generation of medical discoveries and treatments.” [The next two paragraphs of Mosley’s email are, strangely, redacted].
Prior responded just hours later to thank Mosley “for the watermelon cocktails” and added: “[redacted] If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data so that it helps us deliver better care and provides a more insightful data base for medical research, do be in touch.”
The correspondence is clear. The UK government was keen to lay a path in the NHS for Palantir – undermining official claims that the Covid datastore was an emergency fix with no long-term plans in prospect.
Health data, yes – but only with public trust
There are countless ways in which trustworthy and public-spirited use of data could benefit the NHS, and all of us, in tackling disease and delivering better public health outcomes. Several important patient juries on the use of health data consistently show that people are cautiously open to data use for the right reasons: to improve care, and so long as benefits are distributed equally and fairly to all patients.
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Mary Fitzgerald Cori Crider | Radio Free (2021-02-24T10:52:36+00:00) Why we’re suing over the £23m NHS data deal with Palantir. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/02/24/why-were-suing-over-the-23m-nhs-data-deal-with-palantir/
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