A BILLION NHS records containing details of patients’hospital admissions and operations have been sold to a marketing consultancy working for some of the world’s biggest drug companies, The Sunday Times can reveal.

Harvey Walsh, a healthcare intelligence company, has paid for a database that, although stripped of names and addresses, does include the age, postcode district, medical condition and place of treatment for every patient who has received hospital care in England.

The database handed over by health officials covers 125m “episodes” of hospital treatments each year, with details of every patient admission, A&E attendance and outpatient appointment.

Harvey Walsh says it already has 10 years of data and can “track” the treatments that individual patients receive over their lifetime. It said yesterday the data