And while we're talking about patient privacy...

Today Pulse reports that pharmaceutical companies are directly approaching NHS staff to try to get their grubby paws on patient-identifiable data. The story reports that "two staff members had been approached by a pharmaceutical company while at a conference in London, given access to a website and asked to upload patient-identifiable data".

A spokesperson for Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust went on to say: "For some time the trust has been concerned about the lengths to which pharmaceutical companies, or companies working on their behalf, will go to seemingly bypass the research governance route and encourage staff to release person-identifiable data onto third-party databases. A number of attempts have been thwarted by the trust." So it seems that for some time pharmaceutical companies have been trying to weasel patient information out of NHS employees.