Request

I would like to formally request the details of the Doctor that issued the review of my Vacine Damage claim, I need this to check it is actually a doctor that carried out the review, not a semi trained individual, but also should I find comments to be unprofessional standards of a medical nature, report to the Governing Body.

I request this in line with the Freedom of Information Request and the Data Protection Act, should this not be done or not within a reasonable time frame I will need to forward this to the Data Commissioner, I know you will want to help in this issue as I'm sure everyone has done everything to the highest standard so have nothing to hide

Response

All medical assessors are General Medical Council (GMC) registered doctors with a license to practise and at least five years’ experience.

We have considered this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and we are issuing a refusal notice under section 17 of the FOIA.

We can confirm that we do hold the requested information, but this information is exempt under section 40(2) of the FOIA (personal information).

Section 40(2) is an absolute, prejudice-based exemption and therefore is exempt if disclosure would contravene any of the data protection principles. In order for disclosure to comply with the lawfulness, fairness, and transparency principle, we either need the consent of the data subject(s) or there must be a legitimate interest in disclosure. In addition, the disclosure must be necessary to meet the legitimate interest and finally, the disclosure must not cause unwarranted harm.

As we do not have the consent of the data subject, the NHSBSA is therefore required to conduct a balancing exercise between legitimate interest of the applicant in disclosure against the rights and freedoms of the data subject.

The NHSBSA acknowledges that you have a legitimate interest in disclosure of the information in order to provide the full picture of the requested data held by the NHSBSA; however, we have concluded that disclosure of the requested information would cause unwarranted harm and therefore, section 40(2) is engaged.

The expectation of the medical assessors is that they will remain anonymous and will therefore not be subject to contact or pressure from claimants or campaigning groups. Given the certainty that the personal details of the medical assessor will identify them there is a reasonable expectation that this information will not be disclosed under FOI. Disclosing this information would be unfair and as such this would breach the UK GDPR first data protection principle.

With regards to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) there have been concerns for the health and safety of medical assessors and staff administering the scheme. Disclosure of the personal details of the medical assessor is likely to result in considerable distress to them.

Publishing this response

Please note that this information will be published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02138