Over 130 medical staff have written to the Metropolitan police commissioner to ask for an investigation into the leaking of hundreds of medical students’ data onto the internet.

We believe there have been serious breaches of the Data Protection Act that could potentially compromise public safety and pose specific risks of financial exploitation and harassment to medical students and junior doctors.

We are uncertain whether the circumstances surrounding this amount to criminal negligence by the Department of Health and associated agencies, but have concerns that such alleged mishandling of personal data may make it possible for unscrupulous individuals to utilise this data for criminal purposes.

We believe this may justify a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police because of the issues outlined below. Copies of this letter have also been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Information Commissioner …

Arguably, this instance may contravene Article 8 of the Human Rights Act for the Right to Respect for Private and Family Life. A further consideration is that of identity theft for pecuniary purposes. Junior doctors present a soft target for identity theft criminals and particularly those with information technology expertise. The sensitive personal data made available could be utilised for fraudulent activities and exploit the relatively favourable credit histories of junior doctors …

We have grave concerns that the sensitive personal information made available may fall into the wrong hands and be used maliciously.

It is well recognised that determined individuals have impersonated medical professionals in the past and put patient safety at risk (Hansard – written answer 76616 – Impersonation of Doctors – 4th Nov 2002). Sensitive personal data could be utilised for Criminal Records Bureau authorisation as a means of working with vulnerable children and adults.

The worst case scenario is that child sex offenders may gain access to settings such as paediatric wards, GP surgeries and other healthcare settings because they have stolen the identity of a junior doctor or medical student.

You can read the full letter here.

Just how damaging does it have to get before Patricia Hewitt will realise she’s a complete, unmitigated failure? I don’t ever remember reading anything quite so damning signed by quite so many doctors.

Though I guess if she ends up in court over this, Mad Pat will, at least, be able to plead insanity.

After finding that the MTAS system was a complete balls-up and had not only failed in its designed intention to match doctors to jobs but had also spewed applicant’s intimate personal details onto the internet such that they were publicly accessible (see here), it would seem reasonable for Patricia Hewitt to take some action.

Perhaps you might expect that she’d sack the people who design the system. Perhaps she’d resign, and admit that the system she’s introduced was an absolute unmitigated failure. Mad Pat did neither of these.

Instead, she reported Channel 4 News to Ofcom. She hasn’t done anything in terms of getting rid of the company who designed this lamentable system, but has reported the programme which exposed the problem to the broadcast regulator, on the basis that Channel 4 should have reported the problem to the Department of Health more quickly.

Clearly, she thinks that it was absolutely unacceptable that a news programme should take 120 minutes to verify a story before notifying the interested parties, yet spewing junior doctors’ and medical students’ personal data all over the web for anyone to see is merely a minor error.

She said she was sorry ‘to junior doctors or foundation programme applicants who have been caused anxiety or, in some cases, inconvenience as a result’, which is all very nice. But remember, she has broken the law. This is an enormous breach of the Data Protection Act. Saying ‘sorry for causing anxiety’ doesn’t really cut it. If I were to post her intimate details on a website for all to see, would ‘sorry’ be enough?

She also claimed that

There is no evidence that members of the public or other commercial interests, apart from staff at ITN and “Channel 4 News”, accessed the site.

That is an out-and-out lie. There is evidence, and the MTAS project manager has that evidence. And, what’s more, it’s clear from her own speech that it is a lie. She said:

The overwhelming majority of individual accesses before the security breach was closed came from an internet address belonging to ITN, the providers of “Channel 4 News”.

The ‘overwhelming majority’. That means, quite simply, that some of the accesses were not from these internet addresses, but from elsewhere. Therefore, there is evidence that other people accessed the site. She is quite clearly and openly lying to Parliament. If you want to read more of her misguided spiel, check Hansard.

The system has criminally failed, and now she’s lying to cover her own back and kicking off against the people who exposed the flaws.

The Ministerial Code is quite clear about this. Section 1.5.c:

Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister

She surely knows what she has to do.

I thought we’d hit rock bottom yesterday. Once you’ve openly and illegally posted intimate details about applicants on the internet, I didn’t think there was anywhere else to go. I was wrong.

The failed system has been shut down. But now, thanks to an utterly contemptible lack of contingency planning, doctors don’t know if they’ve got interviews next week, or even where and when the interviews will be held.

MTAS was supposed to make NHS job applications more like the private sector. Do companies really try and attract people to work for them for the next thirty-five years by ignoring their past work-related experience, posting their intimate personal details all over the internet, and then not telling them when and where their interviews are? Is that how Mad Pat was appointed?

We no longer have anywhere near enough NHS dentists thanks to this government’s policies so people use other dentists from services online like Asecra. Soon, we won’t have any doctors either.

Latest Update 16:20: It’s now emerged that after a failure of the security of MTAS’s predecessor MDAP, the BMA was promised that the new system would be super-secure. Now we know that not even a password was needed to access thousands of people’s personal details. And I guess we also know the value of a government ‘promise’.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said Mad Pat should resign. I’m starting to get a reputation. But she really is not fit for purpose. After presiding over a catalogue of failures, she’s still in post.

She thinks services for rare diseases should be scrapped, doctors and nurses who don’t wash their hands should go to prison, hospitals should treat animals alongside humans, that NHS debt doubling is a good thing, that the NHS has too many doctors and nurses, and that dirty sheets are the way forward. She’s presided over an absolutely catastrophic failure in reform of medical training, and yet still thinks the NHS has just enjoyed its best year ever. She’s even cut the most vital of services because it’s not a political priority.

And now, it’s revealed that not only was MTAS a failure in selecting the right people for the right jobs, it was also a total security shambles.

Thousands of medical students’ and junior doctors’ personal details – including mobile phone numbers, addresses, and even criminal records – were posted, unprotected, on the internet, for anyone to access. They’re even available on Google.

As if that wasn’t enough, highly sensitive personal data which was supposed to be stored anonymously and separately from personal data – things like sexuality and religion – have been posted on the internet alongside the applicants’ names.

When this was first reported to the NHS’s IT commission, they say ‘Ah, there’s not much we can do about that’. That’s when the doctors went to the media. Then Lord Hunt comes along and claims that these were posted by some malicious individual. That was not true. Then it was claimed that the details had only been visible on the web for a few hours. That was also not true. The system was so badly designed that this data was simply being stored online, without even simple password protection, and had been available to anyone with an internet connection and a titter of wit for at least three days, and almost certainly much, much longer.

But just in case that’s not terrible enough, it has emerged today that not only could such information be downloaded and seen by anyone with an internet connection, but it could also be edited. By anyone. Yep, anyone could get into any applicants online application and edit it to their heart’s content without so much as a password.

This is not only incredibly shoddy security, it’s also illegal. It’s quite clearly against the Data Protection Act, and legal experts are predicting that if any junior doctor decides to sue the government over this, then they’ve got a pretty decent chance of winning the case.

But heck, that’s not enough for this failure of a government.

The system which is currently being tested to hold patient records has managed to spew out the personal details of many consultants, including their home addresses and phone numbers. This is the super-secure system that is virtually impossible to hack, spewing out personal details onto the internet in a completely unprotected fashion.

Patricia Hewitt has presided over the introduction of a system which has destroyed confidence, made lives hell for junior doctors, and now broken the law. She’s been an unmitigated failure of a Health Secretary, and has done damage to the NHS that will take years to put right.

I don’t think I can ask her to resign again. The fact that she’s been through all this and not even considered tendering her resignation tells us everything we need to know about her, and everything we need to know about New Labour, and everything we need to know about political integrity. There’s none left.

Have you ever stayed in a cheap hotel and thought that the sheets didn’t seem quite as fresh and clean as you might hope? Well, under the great leadership of Mad Pat, you might get the same feeling in hospital.

The Times reports today that cleaners at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham have been ordered to top-and-tail used sheets instead of using clean ones, to save 0.275p per sheet. Infection control clearly isn’t at the top of the agenda.

The NHS is crumbling. Florence Nightingale provided clean bedding for every patient over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Yet, in the 21st century, the NHS can’t afford it. Patients are being put at unacceptable risks to fund NHS managers and bureaucracy, yet news programmes are more interested in the love life of a 24 year old socialite.

From the Press Association:

A cash-strapped hospital could open its doors to dogs and cats in a bid to raise extra funds, it has emerged.

Ipswich Hospital is proposing to use its state-of-the-art radiotherapy equipment, which lies dormant at weekends, to treat family pets with cancer at special Saturday morning clinics.

It’s like something from The Thick of It. When the NHS is so cash-strapped that hospitals are thinking of treating animals, things aren’t going well. Why do I suspect the hand of Mad Pat in this? Just to remind you, other proposals she’s come up with include closing unpopular hospital departments, making those who spread MRSA face criminal charges, announcing that the doubling of NHS debt means the financial crisis is “stabilising”, and, perhaps most famously, announcing that this year was the NHS’s “best year ever”. Compared to those gaffes, suggesting that NHS hospitals start treating pets seems relatively sane.

How is this woman still in her job?

Yesterday, in his press conference about the Government’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak said:

If Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago.

There are 790 peers, of which 173 are Labour peers. Labour peers alone do not have the majority required to pass amendments and hold up the bill in the House of Lords.

Sunak also told us:

The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay. This policy does exactly that.

More than 6,000 asylum seekers have crossed the English Channel so far this year, a less-than five-month period. Rwanda has agreed to accept 1,000 asylum seekers over a five-year period… or about 83 per five-month period.

In his press conference yesterday, our Prime Minister claimed that:

the patience of the British people ‘is worn pretty thin by this point.’

I agree with him, though I think our patience is being worn through by him. I think that Ali Smith perhaps put it better in Autumn:

I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to anymore. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful.

I took this out of the library after seeing that the second book in Deary’s intended trilogy, How We Break, had recently been published and positively reviewed.

How We Are was first published in 2014, and it’s a book which blends philosophy with some self-help. It is broadly about habits and the degree to which we live our lives on autopilot. It’s also about how we break out of those habits.

The book is in two ‘acts’, named ‘saming’ and ‘changing’, as in the lyrics to the song These Boots Are Made for Walkin’—‘You keep saming when you ought to be changing’.

And in two words, that’s why I didn’t get on with this book. It is stuffed with pop culture references, particularly to films, which meant absolutely nothing to me. It’s neither fun nor enlightening to read passages about why the action of a character in a movie you’ve never heard of illustrate a key philosophical point.

I suspect this is also the reason other people rave about Deary’s book. I suspect that if you get the references, this genre-bending book is fun and enlightening. I can imagine that it might even be delightful.

But not for someone as ignorant as me.

I still took away some nice quotations:

London Transport, the governing body of the capital’s transport infrastructure, used to have a surprisingly abstract definition of family. On the back of their family ticket, where up to two adults and two children could travel cheaply, they defined family like this: ‘Family are those who stay together for the duration of the journey’

‘A walk in the park’ is a synonym for ease because the park knows how to walk. It does it for us. A good park anticipates our desire. Anticipated desire is the key to leisure. People have been paid and good money has been spent on figuring out what we are going to want to do. They care so that we don’t have to. The good hotel, the theme park, the penny arcade, the pub, the cinema – all of them relieve our consciousness of the burden of worrying about what to do next.

The better the park, the less we have to think what to do next. We place ourselves at the beginning of the path and it walks us, guides us through its sub-routines, its different games. Here for children, there for the scenic stroll, there for tennis, here to sit and enjoy the sun. The path leads, we follow. Many other sets of circumstances, many other social objects, play a similar game with us. The fairground and the playground are the archetypes of these. We want to be taken for a ride, to give over agency, to abdicate will, for a while, to something that will move us without our conscious intercession. That is what we want from leisure, it’s what leisure is — the switching off of choice and doubt.

I am dedicating myself to the perception that, however unlikely, however against nature, improvement happens, people get better. I mean better at living, at being who they are, at handling life with grace, humour and courage. Some people handle life admirably. And other people really don’t. Some get stuck in hideous deforming places and postures and become ever more unbearable versions of themselves.

Thirteen years ago, Apple launched the iPad—the device that seemingly every technology journalist in the world was certain would be called the iSlate. This is handy, as it provides a ready-made search term for anyone interested in transporting themselves back to those days of fevered speculation of quite what such a device would do.

Even after its launch, I was certain that the iPad wasn’t for me. I wasn’t alone in thinking that the market for an oversized iPhone that didn’t even function as a phone would be minuscule. I was wrong. I’m typing this very post on one of the two iPads I used regularly, the third and fourth that I’ve owned.

Partly because of that experience, and partly because I’m older, I’ve reserved judgement as I’ve read the coverage of the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro. There’s another element, too: I can actually see a potential benefit in sitting at home and working with lots of different large computer screens without having to clutter up the house with hardware. It’s not worth the financial cost or the practical tradeoffs at this stage, but I can see a future for this kind of device that would work for me.

As so often, though, Benedict Evans’s writing on the subject widened my perspective. He makes the point that simply projecting 2D screens into 3D space is not really the point of ’spatial computing’—‘That’s cool, but it seems like using a desktop service on an iPhone. It’s not native to the experience. I can use an iPad for that.’

Evans says that the device is really for 3D work. I was—and still am, to a degree—sceptical that 3D is the future of everyday work. As he asks, ‘is our work 3D? Is your data 3D?’ I have strabismus and sometimes think that I barely see in three-dimensions to begin with, so my scepticism is, maybe, unsurprising.

But, ‘is that like looking at a colour monitor in the 80s and saying that your spreadsheets don’t need colour? Putting maps or messaging onto your phone changed where you used it and how it could be useful: what’s the equivalent for 3D?’

It was the ’spreadsheets’ line that got me. I remember being taught, in the 1990s rather than the 1980s, that one really ought not to use colour in spreadsheets. I’d forgotten all about that. These days, it’s entirely normal to see spreadsheets filled with colours: does a risk register even exist if it isn’t pasted into a spreadsheet with colour-filled RAG ratings, which the colourblind among us struggle to interpret?

I think, too, of PowerPoint presentations. These seem, in many cases, to hand supplanted Word documents as the preferred way to share lengthy text-based narratives. They’re not the logical nor most accessible option, but perhaps people find uses for the tools they’re given.

Perhaps in fifteen years’ time, the Vision Pro 15 will be as every day as iPads are today. Perhaps it will be de rigeur to present things in 3D, regardless of whether it’s actually the best approach for any given task. Or maybe the idea will fade away, like Google’s vision for Glass.

‘Of course, most people didn’t realise how big the iPhone would become, and conversely, some people thought that everyone would have a 3D printer. Predicting tech is hard, and predicting human behaviour is harder: we all do things every day that “no-one would ever do”.’

Well, quite.

The image at the top of the post is by Miyako Fujimiya.

This collection of 23 prose stories is based on interviews Judah conducted with people from around Europe. Documentary photographs accompany each story. It aims to build a picture of life in Europe for the ‘ordinary worker’, revealing a diverse community of individuals facing all sorts of challenges in life. Judah’s stories also often reflect life as the COVID-19 pandemic swept Europe; several are stories of refugees fleeing to Europe. Climate change is also a recurring theme.

I’m often intrigued to read about the work lives of others, especially when—like many in this book—the examples are very far removed from my day-to-day experience. It’s fascinating to have an insight into what it is like to take over the family vineyard or to be a pilot who guides cargo ships into harbours. This book provides insight into other worlds that can be found on this continent.

However, it’s taken me about six months to get through this book, which is entirely attributable to the style of writing, which I found very difficult to tolerate on two fronts.

Firstly, Judah writes every single story in the same consistent tone and style. This is a weird choice: when telling different stories from different parts of the continent, you would think it would be natural to vary the tone. For example, I’m sure farmers have particular idiosyncrasies in how they spin a yarn compared to flight attendants. Here, every story is flattened to the same mildly journalistic tone. To me, it feels like that sucks out a lot of the potential pleasure of this book.

Secondly, Judah has an altogether infuriating habit of slipping into the second person for a few sentences now and again. In his afterword, he says that he tried ‘techniques’ to ‘make you feel like any one of these people could be you’, and I think this weird linguistic tic must be what he’s referring to.

This passage provides a good example of Judah using the second person injudiciously:

You tell yourself you’ll never get married.

You tell yourself you know what love looks like.

You don’t expect it to look like a divorced Swedish Finn, who has spent most of his life in Germany, older, with two children over there, giving it a go in Ireland. You also don’t expect them to be called Patrick. Or to be living with his mother in a castle in County Cork.

Maybe it’s my quirk rather than his, but this makes me want to scream: ‘No, I don’t!’

Here’s an example of a random switch from third to second person:

The trolley rattling underneath her.

Her last glimpse of her husband’s face.

You’ll feel much better when this is out.

The doctor smiled. Then the anaesthetist bent over.

The cold gas coming out of the mask.

Count back from ten for me now.

You never make it to seven.

I can only assume that we’re using the second person in the third line as Judah is quoting either the husband or the doctor. I can live with that. But then, by the final line, we’re using the second person for a different reason: presumably as part of Judah’s ‘technique’. It just made me want to fling the book across the room.

Luckily, each of the chapters is a discrete profile of an individual, so it is the sort of book that can be readily appreciated in small chunks.

Despite all of this—and it feels good to get that rant out—I think this book is worth reading. Judah’s stories are varied and thought-provoking, and I think the whole made me feel a little differently about the things that unite people across Europe.