Why are concerns being raised about the security of GP patient records?
BMJ 2025; 389 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r837 (Published 28 April 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;389:r837
- Stephen Armstrong
- London
On 15 April the Guardian published a story headlined “Revealed: Chinese researchers can access half a million UK records.” It quoted “intelligence sources” who warned that “health data can be useful in espionage if anonymisation can be broken.”1
A week later the Daily Mail ran a piece headlined “Why 500 000 Britons including my wife who signed up to this medical research trial MUST leave it now.”2 As the government progresses plans for its new Health Data Research Service,3 partly modelled on UK Biobank, what is the state of play?
What is UK Biobank?
This is a database based on half a million British volunteers recruited 15-20 years ago who have provided lifestyle information, biological samples, and physical measurements. Funded by Wellcome and the Medical Research Council, UK Biobank has followed volunteers’ health through “linkage to healthcare records,” its chief scientist, Naomi Allen, told The BMJ. The dataset is available to researchers around the world “to undertake scientific discoveries to advance our understanding of human health, and that was what all half million participants consented to when they joined the study,” Allen said. Recent published papers that used the data include those from a team at University College London who used eye scans to look for early markers of Parkinson’s Disease and from researchers at Queen Mary University London who identified proteins able to help predict individuals’ risk of more than 60 diseases.45
Does it sell GP data?
“We are a charity,” …
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