Patient Confidentiality.

The issue of patient confidentiality is of considerable importance so perhaps you can imagine my surprise when, on my first day of my new job with Virgin Healthcare I attended a Team meeting.

Minutes of Team meeting (Extracts) (7-01-08):

“NC (Nick Carter) also raised the point that we need to test how to send service offering information to patients as you cannot currently advertise practice services to existing patient lists.  MA (Mark Adams) suggested that there may be a way around this promoting services as Virgin as opposed to promoting them as practice services.”  (My italics)

OK so, let me unpack this a little. The regulations mentioned in the first sentence are those of the British Medical Association:

"Practices should not use personal data of patients to promote the services of a private provider, for example a private screening service. To do this would be a breach of the Data Protection Act.

Practices hold patient data as part of their NHS contract. It was never intended, and patients are not aware or indeed have consented to their personal data being utilised for the purpose of advertising private services." 

So, Senior Managers at Virgin Healthcare want to find 'a way around' these regulations in order that they can then send Virgin marketing materials to the confidential list patients held by an NHS GP.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Virgin employees would have done anything illegal but I don't understand why they were even having this conversation.

This issue raises the interesting contrast between some areas of business where such regulations are there to be circumvented if possible to win a competitive advantage (say one airline company 'spying' on another) and ethics in relation to healthcare where the guidelines aren't there to be circumvented but to act as an absolute minimum standard for behaviour.

Virgin, as a company, seemed to have a problem with distinguishing the two.

I later was to have an interesting conversation with Josh Bayliss, the Group Legal Counsel for Virgin, about his idea that if something is legal therefore it is ethical, at least in the context of a business.

I countered this with the recent case of Glaxo-Smith Kline who have admitted not publishing research that indicated children taking their drug, Seroxat, had twice as much chance of developing suicidal thoughts as those on a placebo. Of the 50,000 children who took Seroxat in the UK we are still unsure how many may have committed suicide as a result of taking the drug.

In fact Glaxo-Smith Kline were not bound, legally, to publish their research but as Ben Goldacre said in the Guardian newspaper - what Glaxo-Smith Kline did may have been legal but it was also 'inherently evil'.

I have a transcript of this conversation and will publish it at a later date. 

As I wrote to Mr Branson in my letter sent by Recorded Delivery to Necker Island on 22nd April:

"I find it hard to believe that you are comfortable with your employees considering how to achieve this and I doubt that you would be happy that a commercial company was able to access your confidential NHS data (and that of your family members) with an eye to forwarding marketing materials to you."

I still have heard nothing from Mr Branson.

Read next story about Virgin Healthcare.