§ Mrs. Renée Shortasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he is satisfied that strict medical confidentiality will be maintained if the principles in the White Paper on data protection are accepted; what consultations will be held with the medical profession before the appointment of the registrar; and what duties and powers he will have to protect medical records.
§ Mr. RaisonYes. Wide-ranging consultations, including the medical profession, are taking place on the Government's proposals. As the White Paper envisaged, regulations providing special protection for medical records may well be needed.
§ Mrs. Renée Shortasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the regulations on computerised personal health records will cover manual systems; and whether applications by the police for information to be made available to them about an individual's personal health data will only be agreed to after the patient's consent has been obtained.
§ Mr. RaisonThe Government's proposals, set out in Cmnd. 8539, apply only to personal data processed by automatic means. It would not be in the interests of effective law enforcement to place a statutory requirement on data users who make information available to the police for the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime to seek the subject's prior consent.