Here are the health-related links that have caught our eyes between December 19th and January 8th:

• Thousands of Summary Care Records created without consent in NHS IT blunder | News Article | Pulse Today – Dr Paul Cundy, chair of the GPC’s IT subcommittee and a GP in Wimbledon, south London, said:  ‘Obviously this is worrying – if it can happen in one place, it can happen in another. If this was down to human error at the software supplier it raises questions of how practices and patients will know if Summary Care Records have been created without their consent.’Dr Paul Thornton, a GP in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, said control over the creation of care records should lie with GPs only: ‘The practice’s role as data controller has been circumvented and this is not acceptable. The control should lie with the practice and not with an outside organisation.’
• Thousands of Summary Care Records created without consent in NHS IT blunder | News Article | Pulse Today – Dr Paul Cundy, chair of the GPC’s IT subcommittee and a GP in Wimbledon, south London, said:  ‘Obviously this is worrying – if it can happen in one place, it can happen in another. If this was down to human error at the software supplier it raises questions of how practices and patients will know if Summary Care Records have been created without their consent.’Dr Paul Thornton, a GP in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, said control over the creation of care records should lie with GPs only: ‘The practice’s role as data controller has been circumvented and this is not acceptable. The control should lie with the practice and not with an outside organisation.’
• The future of the NHS | Jennifer O’Mahony : Journalism & Opinion – We analysed every English trust (Scotland and Wales have separate NHS systems) and checked out services for acute care across the board.The findings are quite shocking. More than twenty A&E; wards are threatened with closure or have already closed, and only a slightly smaller number of maternity wards have either closed or may do so when proposals by trusts are completed.

  In addition, paediatric heart surgery has been scaled back from ten centres to seven. Centres of excellence like the Royal Brompton in London will no longer be saving children’s lives as the NHS is streamlined and savings are made.

  These are called ‘public consultations’, but did we, the British public, really know this was happening to our health service on such a scale?

• Exclusive: CCGs told how practices should spend £30,000 quality premium | GPonline.com – GPC negotiator Dr Chaand Nagpaul said that he expects that in some areas practices will not receive the quality premium directly.‘This is not a payment for practices’, he said. ‘If practices incur more workload in delivering the CCG’s objectives then they would have to be rewarded.

  ‘Our position has been that this money should not be held back for CCGs to earn. They are going live with a tight management budget. We don’t want it to be used to offset deficits.’

• A short guide to health and wellbeing boards | Modernisation of health and care –