Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Kakkar

Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 108A and remind noble Lords of my entry in the register regarding my duties as a doctor and medical researcher.

The overriding duty in common law to protect medical confidentiality is vital to contemporary clinical practice. There are considerable concerns that Clause 15 might provide an opportunity for that duty to be overridden through the application of future regulations. It is important for Her Majesty’s Government to establish that that is not possible and could not be the case in the future. The provisions in common law regarding medical confidentiality provide further safeguards for healthcare data beyond those provided in current data protection regulation and statute. It would be a retrograde step if provision were made that destroyed those safeguards. That might be manifested in a greater reluctance for individual patients to share their confidential information with healthcare professionals. This may result in a poorer ability for the public interest to be satisfied and safeguarded in terms of collecting data on important public health issues. It may also result in greater reluctance for individuals to participate in medical research or to provide their data for fear that it may be shared in the wrong way. Can the Minister provide reassurance that the application of Clause 15, as drafted, would not result in undermining this common law duty, and therefore have serious unintended consequences in the future? If Her Majesty’s Government are not able to provide that reassurance, how would they go about dealing with Clause 15? Would they include in the Bill a measure such as that proposed in Amendment 108A, or what other mechanism would they provide to ensure that this vital common law duty is in no way affected in the future?

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I offer a slight contrast to that. I hope that this clause will help with a couple of sorts of problems that I have come across over the last 20 or 30 years. One concerns children at university who become suicidal and their parents are never told because everybody believes they have a duty of confidentiality and cannot communicate with the parents. A friend of mine got very close to going over the edge but fortunately one of his friends told his parents and then everything got sorted out. Suddenly regarding parents as aliens when someone is 18 and in severe psychological difficulty is an uncomfortable effect of the way that current regulations are perceived. I hope that this provision might loosen things up.

Another aspect is dealing with schoolchildren with eating disorders. Many aspects of eating disorders present as social interactions with other children. However, if there is an absolute prohibition on discussing someone’s condition with other children, even the children who share a bedroom with them in boarding school, that seems to me destructive of the interests of the child. Therefore, I would like to see—and I hoped that I was seeing—a slight broadening of the current regulations which might lead to arrangements which allowed the best interests of the patient to come into effect rather than a strict adherence to the dogma of, “We can’t tell anybody”.