General Chat

Is anything secret ?

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has reminded NHS staff about the potentially serious consequences of prying into patients’ medical records without a valid reason.

The warning came after Brioney Woolfe, a former midwifery assistant at Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, who described herself as ‘nosy’,was ordered to pay a total of £1,715 in fines and costs after pleading guilty to offences of unlawfully obtaining and unlawfully disclosing personal data.

An investigation, which followed a complaint by a patient, established that Woolfe had accessed the records of 29 people including family members, colleagues and others where no connection with the defendant is known, between December 2014 and May 2016.

Some of the information was subsequently shared with others. That was not only a breach of patient confidentiality but also against the Data Protection Act.

Woolfe, was fined £400 for the offence of obtaining personal data, and a further £650 for the offence of disclosing personal data. She was also ordered to pay a contribution of £600 towards prosecution costs, plus a victim surcharge of £65.

Colchester Magistrates’ Court was told Woolfe, inappropriately accessed the medical records of 29 people while employed as a midwifery assistant, using the trust’s Medway electronic patient record system.

According to a report by local newspaper, the Essex Gazette, Woolfe was reported to the head of midwifery at Colchester General Hospital when someone discovered their medical records had been shared with her ex-partner.

Charlotte Brewer, prosecuting, told Colchester magistrates, Woolfe, 28, had accessed personal information without consent of 23 women and six men. Only two of the 29 were pregnant.

Brewer told magistrates Woolfe would look up friends’ records. “If her children had been invited to a birthday party, she’d look up their parents’ details.

The case is one of several ICO prosecutions involving staff illegally accessing health records in recent months and Head of Enforcement Steve Eckersley said:

“Once again we see an NHS employee getting themselves in serious trouble by letting their personal curiosity get the better of them.

“Patients are entitled to have their privacy protected and those who work with sensitive personal data need to know that they can’t just access it or share it with others when they feel like it. The law is clear and the consequences of breaking it can be severe.”

I'd think any one with the necessary code car could access a patients records

and the trace recorded, but what about written ie paper records ?

Paper records are, on the whole, online now, or destroyed.
20 years ago, I asked my doctor why I was incarcerated in an isolation hospital in Scotland when I was a young child - he didn't have my records from Scotland - only from the birth of my first child, in Essex.
I then asked the Scottish NHS - they had no record either, as it was over 20 years ago.

My various hospital paper files are HUGE......some (Ortho and Neuro) spill over into a 3rd file = good luck with trawling through that amount of paperwork :-D

..so why couldn't they find mine :-(
I'm well peed off.

Maggie, I attend 4 different hospitals and see 6 different departments. All my notes are on paper. I know they try to put X-rays onto the system because storing large plates (as they used to be) were much easier to share and copy to disc.

x

I may have to contact NHS Scotland again - or just ask my doctor for blood tests that can indicate all forms of childhood jaundice!
I'm not saying this was long-lasting, but I was hospitalised between the ages of 4 and 6 (probably nearer 6), and when I was 12, a teacher asked me and my friend Angela whether we were half sisters (we obviously had different surnames)
Angela was Chinese Mauritian!
We both wore glasses, had black hair - and, apparently, the same skin tone. :-S

I wonder why records cease 20 years back ? What was the motive to put trusted

paper records on Computer then ? , new software, new millennium ?

It's like banks only having records going back six months (or that's what

some have you believe)

I would be surprised if they only kept records for the last 20 years. Do you not think that it's more likely that only the last 20 years are online and all of the paper file is stored in the bowels of the earth somewhere in a hospital or such like?

They'd need belt and braces in case anyone brought a case as a result of something happening years ago, surely?

Maggie, I'd pester them!

JoyLouise, I need to find out exactly where we were living - I mean the exact address.
I do remember one of my brothers, when, as an adult, I reminded him of my incarceration replying:
'Oh, that explains why you weren't walking to school with us'.
So, they weren't bothered about where their gorgeous youngest sister was, at the time!
This brother is the 'useless, but interesting information' nerd, so he may remember our address. :-D

I just remember it as a converted double decker bus in some farmers cow field.

I was wondering if this breached patient confidentiality.

The daughter of my neighbour works in the local hospital in some sort of non-professional capacity.

A local man had dealt with the break-up of his marriage by drinking himself into a coma and was in hospital. Quite by surprise, somebody told us this man had died in hospital, having been told by our neighbour who had just received a text from their daughter.

Being friendly with the man's mother and sister, I telephoned them with my condolences and to ask if there was anything I could do and they were shocked to find that I knew.

It seemed that they had wanted it to stay secret until all of the family had been told.

She has done the same thing again recently with somebody who had been at school with her and her cousin who she had texted when he died. His death has never been publicly announced.

Has she been breaching patient confidentiality?

The 20 years back limit malarkey doesn't hold true in a broader sense.

Police records go way back, Parliamentary records are ancient, WD records

go back a century or more. So what's so special about Hospital records ?