asked the Minister of Health if he will make arrangements to ensure that patients' hospital records remain confidential except in exceptional cases where matters of public interest or criminal matters are involved.

The present arrangements for ensuring confidentiality seem to me to be satisfactory.

While thanking my hon. Friend for chat reply, may I ask whether he will agree that it is very important that communications between doctors and patients should remain as confidential as possible both in the interests of the doctors and of the patients?

Yes, I fully agree with my hon. Friend. He can be assured that hospital authorities will give information from medical records only for sufficient reason and will take care to ensure that the information given to a patient is not medically harmful to him. My hon. Friend may also like to know that hospital authorities have been given guidance about the supply of information about patients engaged in legal proceedings and that this guidance has been agreed with the British Medical Association and the Law Society.