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Voting at this morning's LMCs conference, GPs overwhelmingly backed motions criticising the government's lax attitude to IT security and demanded that patients have the final say over whether or not their details are uploaded to the system.

But LMC members rejected calls to desist from working on the programme until the DoH can guarantee confidentiality.

Dr Michael Ingrams, from Hertfordshire LMC, warned that the attitude GPs take towards patient confidentiality may not be reflected throughout the health service.

‘The government insists that the culture of confidentiality extends to all those who work in the health service,' he said. ‘But they'd probably say that culture exists in those who work in the intelligence services, and they leave records on trains.'

Dr Paul Cundy, the GPC's IT expert, warned that the care record programme was in the ‘last chance saloon'.

NHS Connecting for Health should implement a recent University College London report, which recommended that patient consent should be needed to review records. It also said that a summary care record should be restricted to a summary of a patient's medical history.

Conference also passed a motion calling for GPs to be ‘custodians' of all primary care patient records.

 jonn.elledge@haymarket.com