Qualified privilege legislation to support clinician quality assurance: balancing professional and public interests

Patient healthrelated datasets are protected by national and statebased privacy laws which establish requirements for data security that safeguard identified patient information.1–3 Nevertheless, these data may potentially be accessed by third parties in accordance with the law — for example, in connection with freedom of information requests or legal proceedings — by statutory bodies such as the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, or by jurisdictional health complaints commissions. Patient information from health service medical records is regularly used in medicolegal proceedings, a recent significant example of which was the BawaGarba case in the United Kingdom,4 discussed below.