Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many people’s GP records have been made accessible to contractors and sub-contractors working on NHS England’s Cohorting as a Service system in 2023; and what data fields have been shared.
The clinical data used in the Cohorting as a Service system covers between 15 and 20 million people in the flu and COVID-19 cohorts. The system is built and maintained by NHS England employees and one main contractor, with less than fifteen people in the team having access to the relevant clinical cohorting data. This data is only accessed by exception, for example to investigate or resolve problems. The remainder of the team use test data for building the service and do not have access to the clinical data.
The system accesses the following data fields:
- NHS Number;
- surname and forename;
- date of birth/age;
- address and postcode;
- ethnicity;
- sex;
- the associated SNOMED5 CT codes and dates for medical conditions and drug treatment(s) relevant to the cohort criteria.