The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7330 p885
18/25 December 2004

Accessible account of the legal and ethical issues around medical records

‘Medical records: use and abuse’, by Heidi Tranberg and Jem Rashbass. Pp vii+173. Price £24.95. Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press; 2004. ISBN 1 85775 604 5

This is a thoughtful, erudite yet accessible account of the legal and ethical issues surrounding medical records. It will be of value to those who teach would-be pharmacists, to those who set policy, give guidance or take decisions on issues of access or disclosure and to those pharmacists who simply want to be up to date in this complex and developing area of confidentiality. The authors, combining expertise in law, psychology and medicine, rightly assert that “health care is an information-rich activity” and that the march of computerisation creates opportunities to store and share vast quantities of diverse and intimate information collected for health care purposes with an increasing number of people or organisations claiming a legitimate interest in the data.

The scope of the text is comprehensive: 12 chapters range over the value of consent and technology in addressing an alleged crisis in medical privacy, through debate on whether certain forms of medical data are of special sensitivity, accounts of patient access rights, of research and freedom of information considerations and the concepts of public interest, anonymisation and pseudonymisation, to a critical review of the use of medical records in legal proceedings. Nevertheless, this book is concise enough to be read as a whole yet scholarly enough to be a useful reference book for the shelf.


Joy Wingfield

Joy Wingfield is professor of pharmacy law and ethics, school of pharmacy, University of Nottingham