TWENTY doctors’ surgeries in Blackburn with Darwen have signed up to a controversial project which aims to upload patient records to a central NHS database.

The borough has been chosen as one of four “pathfinder” areas for the Care.data project, in which the Health and Social Care Information Centre will collect anonymised medical records held by GP practices.

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The surgeries will test different methods of informing patients about the move, after a previous national roll-out was abandoned due to concerns that few patients were aware of their right to opt out.

Eight surgeries in the borough have not signed up so far.

NHS officials said the data would help health commissioners study issues such as diagnosis, waiting times and patterns of illness or disease, and “at no time will anyone’s name or full address or notes of conversations with their GPs be collected”.

But fears have been raised by privacy campaigners that some patients may be identifiable from the data.

They say the information could fall into the hands of hackers or insurance companies who will use it to increase premiums for patients with certain conditions.