To register “You will need your BMA membership number or GMC number plus the postcode from your membership record (ie that to which your paper BMJ is sent).”
http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/bma-members/access-the-bmj

Sound difficult? You can get full names and GMC numbers by entering any surname into the following URL, and I expect many doctors receive the BMJ at their surgeries
http://www.gmc-uk.org/register/search/index.asp

But personally I’m doing medical research, of a type, so I’d register as a guest.
https://registration.bma.org.uk/registerguest

This conclusion in the original BMJ article is sadly misguided. My day job includes technical support and I know how easy it is to get users to tell me their passwords (some even volunteer unprompted) or leave me with a logged-on session. No hacker skills are needed.

One possible attack is by an insider, collecting information for the more unscrupulous breed of door-to-door salesmen, who are quite willing to bully the elderly. I’m sure these would pay big bucks for (say) a list of 100 local people with newly diagnosed Alzheimers. And getting this report from a computerised system would be very much easier than making 100 phone calls to receptionists.

What is the purpose of the NHS’s NPfIT? To make information about patients more freely available. Built into the system from the start was the freedom for any Dept of Health civil servant to examine private data, so several years later why should the inevitable function creep not have granted those permissions to anyone with the guts to ask? Surely in a few more years it will be criminal NOT to have lost a few CDs in the post!

“on the other, parents feel they can no longer trust the medical professionals.”

I’m quite sure it’s not just parents who no longer trust the “carring proffesions” it’s the children as well.

Age Concern has tried to bring the subject of “elder abuse” up on many occasions in the past few years, seamingly without being heard by those in authority.

The government just cut the number of inspectors down and implement self inspection scheams, on private care homes etc.

Oh and complaints against inspectors reports appear to be almost invariably upheld in the favour of the private organisations…

There seems a common thread; how much do people trust those who collect information about them? On the one hand, we see medical receptionists are perhaps too trusting (or perhaps the system is genuinely trustworthy); on the other, parents feel they can no longer trust the medical professionals.