Comment: Don’t hide truth on lost records

Mar 25 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

MANY patients will be shocked to learn that hundreds of records have gone missing from Merseyside’s hospitals and surgeries over the past two years.

Data protection has become one of the biggest issues in politics, following a number of high-profile cases in which the Government admitted it had lost or mislaid computer disks containing sensitive or confidential information.

The revelations we report today will do little to reassure the public that their details are in safe hands. Several of the cases we highlight involve data going missing in the post, while, in another, records of several patients were found to have been thrown away.

In total, there has been a loss of 230 records by health staff in the region. What is even more concerning is that, in the largest case, involving Liverpool Primary Care Trust, the data loss was not even reported to the patients involved.

The kind of information that has been lost includes one case where the names, partial addresses and door access codes to communal accommodation, such as sheltered housing, were taken.

Nearly all PCTs in our region have reported some data loss over the past two years.

In the light of such repeated lapses of security, some reassurance can be had from the fact that these have prompted changes in working practices at health trusts across the area.

But such losses of personal data will do little to persuade people that the Government – which still wants to introduce a national ID card scheme – can be trusted with such sensitive information.

It is good to see that, at least, health trusts at last seem to be tightening up their procedures in the wake of these data losses.

But they will have some way to go before public confidence is fully restored. One way in which they could do this would be to have a more open policy where such data losses occur, rather than having to have the information dragged out of them.