Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what safeguards are in place to prevent patients’ medical records being accessed (1) inappropriately, and (2) illegally, in NHS Trusts in England where digital records are kept.

National Health Service trusts are required to maintain audit logs of access to patient information and have controls in place to prevent and identify unauthorised access. The Government is currently considering options for further action, and we will set out more detail in due course. In the meantime, NHS England will be launching a hard-hitting campaign telling staff Don’t let curiosity kill your career.

We expect the Single Patient Record to help strengthen ways to tackle this issue, including improving the audit trail for cases like this, so that trusts can take clear action when staff access records without due cause. Security and privacy of people’s health data are paramount, and as you’d expect we will build the strongest safeguards into the Single Patient Record. We’ll be confirming more on this as we develop the Single Patient Record in the coming months.