Friday, October 28, 2011

NHS patient data ends up on Facebook. But how serious is the latest data debacle?



http://ow.ly/7bYSg

An article by Paul Sawers appearing on thenextweb.com website.

This article deals with alleged privacy violations by the NHS, the UK's publicly funded healthcare system.

The article states, "Big Brother Watch, a UK-based civil liberties organization, placed a freedom of information request and it has reported that there were more than 800 confidentiality breaches in the past three years, across more than 150 NHS trusts. One such incident, at the Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust, resulted in a member of staff being dismissed after posting a picture of a patient on Facebook.

The data request identified 23 incidents where NHS staff had posted confidential medical data on social networking sites, either mentioning a patient’s name, commenting on them or sharing details from their records.

Furthermore, there were more than 90 incidents where NHS staff had accessed or used private medical information of their colleagues, whilst there were more than 30 incidents where they looked up relatives on their internal databases. Their actions led to a total of 102 NHS staff being sacked."  Links to referenced materials are provided in the article, including a link to the full Big Brother Watch report.

No comments:

Post a Comment