Oral Answers to Questions

David Davis Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

I am delighted to assure the hon. Lady that as part of the accelerated access review, we are considering how we can ensure that the £1 billion commitment to the cancer drugs fund is used to accelerate through the most effective treatments, and, through the new system that NHS England is putting in place, to make sure that patients get access to better drugs more quickly.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

T9. The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust recently signed an agreement to share 1.6 million patient records with Google’s DeepMind subsidiary. The data include medical history, HIV status, past drug overdoses, abortions, and all pathology, radiology and visit records. It is claimed that the data are anonymised, which is impossible given the nature of the data, and no permission was obtained from patients. It is also claimed that the agreement was made under the Secretary of State’s guidelines. Will he tell the House what he is doing to protect the privacy of such information?

[Mr Jeremy Hunt]

I am very happy to do so. My right hon. Friend has campaigned long and hard, and rightly so, on such issues. The truth is that the guidelines under which the NHS operates for the sharing of patient-identifiable data are not as clear as they need to be. That is why I asked the Care Quality Commission to undertake an independent investigation into the quality of data protection by NHS organisations and Dame Fiona Caldicott to update her guidelines. I hope that we will have news on that soon and certainly before the summer recess, which will please my right hon. Friend.