The National Health Service can be trusted to handle patient records despite the loss of thousands of personal details from hospitals, according to David Nicholson, its chief executive.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats want a planned electronic database of 50 million patient records in England to be reconsidered.

But Mr Nicholson said that the losses were being taken seriously and the new e-records system would be more secure than internet banking.

Eight trusts in England are reported to have lost 168,000 patient details in total. A ninth was reported over the weekend to have lost patient data, but the Government says that this involved staff details. The NHS Grampian health board in Scotland also admitted that it had lost patient records eight times in the past five years. The losses emerged through checks ordered after the loss of 25 million child benefit claimants’ details reported last month.

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Mr Nicholson told the BBC: “I can absolutely assure you that clinicians, professionals and people like myself take this sort of thing very seriously.”

He said the level of security for the proposed new database system – part of the protracted £12 billion upgrade of the NHS IT system – would be way beyond the level currently in internet banking.

“This is a very high level of security. There isn’t going to be a huge national database,” he said. “What we’re talking about is a series of regional databases that are connected together.”

But the proposed e-records database, known as “the Spine”, will still mean that patient details can be accessed anywhere in the country by NHS staff using a password and ID card. Security breaches have occurred when nurses and other staff have used colleagues’ cards and codes to view the details of celebrity patients.

Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s GPs’ committee, said that he was not reassured by the development of regional databases rather than a single database.

“The regional databases are still extremely large. MPs have been concerned about identity cards – they certainly should be concerned about this project,” he said.

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