Health: Confidential Patient Information

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, everybody in the country has a right to object to their data being shared. Those objections will always be respected. A practical way had to be found to enable that process to happen, and we believe that it is not unreasonable to expect a patient to have a conversation with their GP. I will, however, take the noble Baroness’s suggestions on board and feed them in.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

Does my noble friend agree that while patients can object to having their records sent, they cannot, in fact, legally prevent the GP sending those records to the central repository? It is at that point that the discussion as to whether those records should be sold on and used by pharmaceutical companies and others is important. Does he agree that it is important that companies carrying out research into new drugs and compounds can access patient records, because they are an important dataset for making sure that we have better healthcare for our people?

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is correct. The UK has a unique advantage in being able to link patients’ data records for the purposes of research and for effective healthcare commissioning. It would be extremely concerning if European law prevented that. I believe and hope that patients will be encouraged that there will be no abuse of identifiable information. The controls around this are very strict and, in the main, only anonymised data are required for research purposes.