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Health department profiled NHS doctor who fought for Covid disclosures [1]
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Date: 2023-12
The government gathered 18 months’ worth of information on an NHS doctor who fought for the release of Covid-19 planning documents that it wanted to keep secret, openDemocracy can reveal.
Moosa Qureshi, a haemotologist at NHS hospitals in London and Kent, has been working to force ministers to publish nearly a dozen pandemic preparedness exercises since early 2020.
But his pursuit of transparency has resulted in him being extensively profiled by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which has refused to say what information it has gathered on the medic.
Campaigners have warned that Qureshi’s case is part of a “worrying” wider trend of government departments compiling dossiers on their critics.
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In May 2020, Qureshi used Freedom of Information (FOI) laws to ask for the full findings of Exercise Cygnus, a 2016 government simulation of a flu outbreak that was designed to assess how prepared the UK was for a viral pandemic.
Qureshi hoped to uncover to what extent Boris Johnson’s government had used the findings to inform its decision-making in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic – and, crucially, whether it had overlooked some of Cygnus’s key recommendations.
The government fought the release of some of this information for more than a year. It finally handed over the triage and social care papers in June 2021, when ordered to do so by then-information commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who said they were of overwhelming public interest as they related to “literally life and death decisions”.
Moosa Qureshi still does not know what information the government has gathered on him | Moosa Qureshi
When Qureshi finally obtained the withheld papers, it became apparent that political leaders had not shared plans or guidance for healthcare rationing with NHS staff when hospitals became overwhelmed.
By then, more than 100,000 people in the UK had already died of Covid-19. “The opportunity for democratic scrutiny and shared learning had been squandered,” Qureshi told openDemocracy.
Frustrated by the government’s stonewalling, Qureshi submitted a Subject Access Request (SAR) to the DHSC in May 2021 to find out whether staff had been discussing his FOIs.
An individual can use an SAR to force an organisation to hand over any information it holds on them, and declare how it obtained the data, how it is being used, and with whom it has been shared.
Organisations should respond to these requests within one month of them being made.
Yet after more than a year of delays, the DHSC told Qureshi that his SAR could not be completed because the sheer volume of information the department had collected on him meant it would take one staff member more than a year and a half to sort through.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/government-profiled-doctor-moosa-qureshi-covid-freedom-of-information-cygnus-clearing-house-cabinet-office/
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