The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Medical Confidentiality

Atos Healthcare, the private company paid by the Government to help get more cancer patients back to work, has been ordering its medical staff to sign the Official Secrets Act. Britain's leading liberal newspaper considers it "highly unlikely" that medical personnel would be prosecuted under the Act if they blew the whistle on matters of patient safety, although the source of this estimate of probability is unclear. Certainly Britain's Head Boy, who thinks employees should be fined for seeking legal redress and who regards the nation's foreign policy mainly as a pretext for helping underprivileged arms dealers, might well take a jolly dim view of any unethical behaviour; and then, of course, there is Nick Clegg. For its own part, Atos claims that it has contracts with the Ministry of Defence, which is why staff working for the Department for Work and Pensions have to be treated like military personnel; evidently drawing up a separate security policy just because the work is different would have been contrary to market forces. A spokesbeing for the Department for Work and Pensions said that, despite being run by Iain Duncan Smith, the department was not aware.

2 Comments:

  • At 10:11 pm , Anonymous Madame X said...

    Does this mean they can also be drafted into military service without notice? And how far does the Kevin Bacon game go? I'm concerned about visiting a country in whose military my nephew once served.

     
  • At 11:51 pm , Blogger Philip said...

    I imagine that much will depend on who gets the contract to run the armed forces when they are formally privatised.

     

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