Big Brother is watching you

Released 20/03/2009

by Matt Jane

Matthew Jane discusses rating GPs and George Orwell

George Orwell saw it coming. A time in the future when our actions are monitored and recorded, the people we spoke to and the places we visited, and our beliefs and opinions are regulated by the Thought Police.

While GP practices are nowhere near the same league as the 1984 vision, the news this week that the NHS is close to agreeing a deal to tie them in with iwantgreatcare.com will make many surgeries uneasy.

The website is designed to give patients the chance to rate their doctors and give feedback on their healthcare. This opens up a potential can of worms in which practices could fall foul to vindictive patients or inaccurate feedback.

Professional reputations are brittle things - it is incredibly hard to build good ones but it is all too easy to break one and even harder to build it back up.

While everyone would like a transparent NHS system where data is freely available and patients are empowered to make informed decisions, there is an understandable concern over a system that could potentially lead to damaging misinformation.

The trouble with the world-wide web is that as soon as something is posted in cyber-space it is incredibly hard to recall it. Whereas newspapers may become tomorrows chip paper, the web is a mind boggling expanse of endless data and information, which it is very hard to pull anything out of.

It could, of course, be a positive move that pushes surgeries to reassess their working practice and maybe explore new avenues that ultimately benefit patients.

Whether Big Brother is watching you or merely Mr Simpson from number 63, as long as your practice is ticking all the boxes you should have nothing to fear.

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