Recent years have seen the introduction of three major pieces of legislation conferring on patients a right to access to their medical records: the Data Protection Act 1984, the Access to Medical Records Act 1988 and the Access to Health Records Act 1990. This legislation, coupled with increasing patient awareness of their legal rights makes an understanding of the subject necessary. This book sets out to meet this need by providing hospital managers, doctors and other health care professionals with a practical guide to the relevant law. For easy reference it is divided into three parts: patient access; access and litigation; and professional confidence and third party access.