In the news

Well luckily it's ten times further than that from the ground.

• or -
  
  

There is no safe distance from Radio 1.

1 squared is still 1

these past few pages have made me want to rewatch the x-files

Wait, what...

Can you dive in Cherenkov radiation? That doesn’t seem like it should be a thing.

Ha - not quite - the lights are, apparently, just the pool lights.

And nuclear rod pool commercial divers is also, apparently, a thing.

Because inverse square rule, of course.

Also isn't the level of radiation in those pools (at least, unless you're super close to the rods) lower than outside of the pool?

Edit: There's an XKCD for that: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

I don't know if this is the right thread for this... but the NHS opt outs...

It's not clear to me what I should be doing.
A Type 1 opt out seems to stop your information leaving the GP, so I did that, but do I also need to do a type 2 opt out, or does the type 1 stop that being relevant? If I do both, am I at risk of my level of opt out being compromised somehow?

You need to do both. From someone in the know:

It's basically two forms, one to your GP and one to NHS digital. If you opted out of care.data when they tried that, you don't need to do the second form (you can check whether you did or not here: https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/manage-your-choice/) but you might want to opt out for any children you've had since 2014.

Also answers my question, thank you :)

Why are people keen to opt out? Centralised health records for research is an incredibly positive thing for a country with such poor cancer and other health outcomes (compared to a lot of EU nations).

Is the concern that some time down the road this data would be sold out of the NHS or used for insurance purposes?

I mean, ~15 years ago people were massively opposed to the use of NHS data in certain ways...fast forward to 2021 and that data is one of the reasons our vaccine rollout has been so effective. Just keen to understand the argument against.

NHS being criminally underfunded and operating on less-than-optimal staffing and technology leaves their data security to be a potential weak point.
Maybe not immediately, but you know that shit isn't being updated ever.

They only upgraded from Windows 95 / NT in 2018

It's definitely not going to be monetised. Definitely not.

and if you believe that, you're still waiting for the 350 mill from the bus.

https://medconfidential.org/for-patients/loopholes/

Cool, I get that.

Its a national disgrace that we haven't got centralised primary care records for research purposes yet. We're massively lagging behind where we need to be. Totally agree that its a big ask for it to go ahead with protections that you can trust in place. I do not trust this government to protect our data. I personally won't be opting out though.

Somewhere in a Venn between totally trustworthy politicians currently at the helm and complete faith in database security of those same commissioning parties for me.
Ask me to opt-in and what my options to share are, happy to consider. Opt me in without asking me, fuck right off.

Its as if the NHS doesn't learn its lessons. And here we are yet again, about to botch a truly amazing opportunity for improving healthcare in the UK because the necessary communications, trust and protections are not in place. Its maddening.

annoying because in principle i support something like this, having such a pool explicitly helps those who have the most severe / rare conditions as well as day to day operations, but it's hard to separate something like this from the current trends of ethical misuse within big data and political currents. i dont think it's a stretch to say it could happen, and i don't really trust our current political system to stop such a thing with the drift towards technocratic / big data / surveillance solutions in other areas.

i'm now off to patch up my tinfoil

I think you're spot on tbh. No tin foil about it.

But it’s not the NHS letting us down. It’s Glovecock or whichever cockpuppet who is put ‘in charge’ that wreaks this havoc and they didn’t learn from the care.data farce last time and they shouldnt get the chance not to learn from implementing (ha!) this. Apologies for the rantyness.

I don't think the opt out rate will be high enough to affect anything really. A quick google shows it was just 2.74% back in March 2019. Even if it hits 10% it's not going to affect much research.

I'm part of several trials at the moment (ONS/IQVIA Covid study, STRIDES donation study, and something else I can't remember right now) but they have explicit opt-in so they shouldn't be affected by me opting out of the general NHS one.

As others have said, it should have been opt-in and not opt-out.

Reminds me, need to fill in the other form and get it to my GP soon.

As others have said, it should have been opt-in and not opt-out.

The problem with that is the opt-in rate would be very low so the data would have much less value.

Why would people bother to opt-in? There is no particular benefit to them and it requires doing something. Look at the cost and effort, and legal compulsion, with the census.

it should have been opt-in and not opt-out.

Wasn't that one of the GDPR principles which spurred this whole thing?

It's not so clear cut. There are several reasons that GDPR can be legitimately ignored, it's not a hard and fast block on sharing everything. GDPR was ignored for various data scrapes related to Coronavirus for example, and quite rightly.

The problem, as always, is that you can't trust the current Government not to ignore the rules and claim that whatever need they have to share the data is legitimate. And share it too broadly. And let the people they share it with use it for things other than the immediate/legitimate need. And not ensure that the data is destroyed the second they've finished using it. etc. etc.

GDPR is about personal data, which pretty much means personally-identifiable data. And it's aimed at commercial organisations, and very general in most areas. Then anonymisation of bulk data is a complex subject in its own right...

Your data will likely be totally safe...

“Tory peer and former TalkTalk boss confirms she is considering applying for top job at NHS England”