"fingerprints or iris scans - are not of sufficient quality for the scanners to recognise." OK if biometrics don't work then use some a physical form of ID like badge, card or key along with a passcode. Sure this isn't perfect either - people forget the cards, their passwords. But we manage elsewhere with banks our houses our cars and for those who work in London, Oyster cards. People get used to remembering this stuff when they walk out the door to go to work. "Besides which, spending untold millions on a database of dubious benefit and manifold hazards seems to be rather a waste of money compared with, say, employing more ambulance staff, paying them a decent wage and giving them half-decent kit?" What about if you consider that having a database is actually integral to "half-decent kit"? For example, how about if on the way to an emergency call, the patients DNA record can be called up and a suitable drug can be synthesized or selected on-the-fly, from a standard repertoire of drugs carried on callouts, that will best suit treatment with that DNA profile. Far fetched? Could happen in maybe 30 or 40 years time. Or access to previous episodes of the patient's illness and MRI scans to determine which cause of action succeeded then and how this could be used now. Far fetched? Yes - but it could happen. We have to be careful not to have a luddite hypocrisy. If I'm opposed to electronic information systems, then perhaps I should get off this blog, close my Facebook account, cancel my mobile phone, cancel my email address, cancel my online banking, not play online role playing games, don't book holidays online... Society embraces technology, why should our dear old sacred NHS be the exception? Let me restate the precise problem: It is our short-termist political system, lacking continuity across 4/5year government terms, that imposes unreleastic targets to satisfy party political manifesto gain. A good database will take decades to achieve and should be done in phases. If this is done right, i.e. then the concept and design will be equipment independent and be able to take advantage of new technology. I can understand that health care staff who post here have a mistrust in IT systems, if they have had bad experience. IT systems are not bad per-se intrinsically, it's how they are implemented, how they are maintained and how well people are trained. "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" I totally agree that we must have privacy and like you I disagree with this above statement. From standard biology text books in education, we all have a general idea of what people would look like with clothes removed and we don't say well there's nothing to hide because I know how that looks, we still choose to wear clothes and the same should apply for our data.