Question about NHS staff looking themselves up on medical system

[whatisdrowsybutawake]

Hi, my DH is a newly qualified mental health psychiatrist and has been employed by NHS (Scotland) for few months. I have name changed for this post.

He admitted yesterday that out of curiosity he looked himself up on the system, and was able to access records from when he received treatment for his own mental health. He quickly realised this was inappropriate and is now very worried that this will be picked up in an audit and he could face disciplinary.

Does anyone have experience of this, or know if he is likely to be caught? He is unsure whether to raise it with his manager or just keep quiet about it. Thanks

Counsellors aren’t or “psychologists”, unless it’s a clinical psychologist. People sometimes wrongly call people psychiatrists etc when they mean a counsellor of some sort. “Mental health psychiatrist” doesn’t really make any sense, so it was a red flag that perhaps the DH wasn’t a psychiatrist or even a clinical psychologist.

Happens all the time. Most of the time it won't be picked up but sometimes it is. If is gets picked up then he will get a telling off. He won't lose his job over it.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous anyway, I have no idea why looking up your own stuff is a problem.

Wtf was he thinking? It's instilled at every level of training from day 1 of student life and regularly thereafter. He will have also had it during induction. My advice is that he tells his manager, takes responsibility for it and takes the bollocking in the Hope they appreciate his honesty after the event. It is gross misconduct so he needs to think carefully about his words to convey how sorry he is, how he has reflected on it and why it will never happen again.

I had to deal with loads of these during covid - everyone knew that the swab results came through on the local system hours before you got a text with the results.

@Verylongtime you can get psychiatrists who work in learning disability or addictions etc so it’s common to hear the term mental health psychiatrist as someone working with people who are experiencing mental illness. I’m pretty sure the op knows what her husband does for a living.

what Do you mean by newly qualified psychiatrist?

beeb out of medical school for 5 minutes or just got his CCT which means he has been working in the NHS for a minimum of 8 years.

this question is really odd. Every doctor knows you shouldn’t use electronic patient record access for non work reasons.

If he is logged into the medical record as himself it will likely get flagged
If he has used someone else's open computer then that shows he knew it was wrong and tried to circumvent being caught.
Depending on the robustness of your health informatics team with depend on this getting reported to his boss.
As a clinical manager I had conversations with staff who looked themselves up and people who were not under their care e.g. a patient in maternity when they work on the ortho ward.....a lot of that would be flagged at first instance that a weird location was chosen to look at a patient chart as every computer is mapped.
Then people looking up people with the same surname, or minors when you work with adults flags a parent looking up a chart.
The best thing he could do is inform the health informatics team and show remorse and reflection.
Misuse of the system is a first and final warning in my organisation as we are completely digital.

Because it’s complete abuse of the system. It could easily be gross misconduct, and probably is.
It also indicates lack of professionalism, poor boundaries and judgment, as well as stupidity.

This.

It can't be a data protection breach when it is his own records. He is the data subject, and he has consented to his accessing of his own records.

I can see that it is a breach of policy, but I find it surprising that looking up your own records would be treated with the same disciplinary action as looking up someone else's records.

@Ridikulus is it? I thought it was just recent GP stuff and vaccinations, and even then it's really limited on mine. If I wanted to access anything non-GP I'd have to put in special requests to whatever Trust.

@whatisdrowsybutawake I once clicked on a close relative's record (same surname) by mistake as their name was next to the patient i wanted to check. I realised straight away, clicked away, and told my manager later that day. She was fine with it, nothing came of it. But obviously a different scenario to your DP. How long did he spend looking before realising he shouldn't be?

If they've sent a letter to your GP it will be in the documents tab.

The data may be about him, but it's not his data. He doesn't own it. There's a difference. All medical records belong to the NHS.

For the people who query why someone shouldn’t be able to access their own medical records, it’s an abuse of trust and power.

We all have the ability to gain access to our medical records through a subject access request, happening to have access to the system shouldn’t change that.

Also, depending on his position he might be able to manipulate e.g. prescriptions etc.

Most industries have strict rules about accessing yours or friends and family details. I work in the banking sector and accessing any account belonging to me or any friend or family is expressly forbidden. Even if someone I know comes through to me I have to pass them to another team member as it’s a conflict of interest.

I used to audit MIMS. So many violations every time

Yes, I know. A relative of mine is a consultant psychiatrist (years of medical school, followed by years of specialism) in the NHS. She does specialise in addiction, but wouldn’t refer to herself as an “addiction psychiatrist” but I do take your point. But a lot of laypeople don’t understand the difference between the psych jobs, and it may easily be that people wrongly call themselves psychologists or psychiatrists willy-nilly and tell their friends and family that too.

More likely that you would see where the nhs has cocked up in your treatment. It’s to stop them being sued.

@Verylongtime I don’t think many people would tell their wife they were a psychiatrist when they were actually a psychologist or a therapist. What would be the point?

Agree with this. No one ever got caught doing this when I worked for the NHS, even though they threaten us with it. I have a really common surname and often had to access patients with the same surname. No one ever said anything to me about it, even though they could easily have been my family.

Nope I've had MH inpatient treatment and I attempted suicide on a number of occasions. I now work in that area. Clinical notes are observations and have details that might not be nice, I wouldn't want to see records of that time. Why would I ? I'm alive and successfully treated. I think they can still seal some records if it's in the person's best interests.

Nope. Not all the U.K. has this. No app, no access to everything.

Lots of reasons. They don’t understand the difference themselves; they think those differences don’t matter, that they’re the same thing; they want to feel more important than they are; they want to appear more qualified; they want to impress people, or intimidate them. Etc.

Not in my experience. You just log on and all your medical records are there to view.

Maybe it's not available for everyone, but if a lot of people can look up their records, I don't see what's wrong with an NHS employee doing the same thing.

@Ridikulus I can't see clinical notes from different Trusts on there? I've had a lot of interventions in the last year in particular (difficult pregnancy and subsequent health issues) from different Trusts and none of that is on there. It doesn't even say I've given birth anywhere.