AIBU to feel appalled by staff accessing murdered children’s records?

[girlfriend44]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrpdkevvnko

Poor parents of Grace and Barnaby Webber. not only were their children murdered they then found this out about people looking up the records who shouldn't have.

Hope all those people are totally embarrassed. Glad they got caught out.

i was totally shocked
just appalled.

You'd do it then would you ,?

it just shows you we trust our lives in the hands of completely morally rotten people

i remember more than 20 years ago a colleague was checking her colleagues records to see if she did actually attend hospital, which i found awful.

bad enough to look at your family's results let alone looking up the notes in this case.
there must have been an explanation

Me personally no I wouldn’t, because I probably wouldn’t have a clue what any of it meant.

But I can understand why some people in a medical profession may be curious enough to want to read the medical reports.

That doesn’t mean I condone it, because I don’t.

I’m glad it’s been bought to light and they are being punished for it.

Ah, but if you find out one of them had just had an abortion, or been to the rape crisis centre, or had an HIV test, or cancer scare, you can flog that to the Mail.

Absolutely disgusting behaviour.

It's not human nature it's abhorrent voyeurism."

They had no reason to look. They didn't respect other people's privacy. Wonder if they'd like it done to them?

I work for a Gov dept and it’s a sackable offence (and vast majority are sacked) to look up records that you have no business to look up. So a neighbour, a friend, an ex. You’re warned about it, not sure why people risk their job for it.

How do you know it does on a lot more than people realise? If you work in the NHS please can you report your observations.

Well they’ve been appropriately punished and hopefully it will make other people think twice about doing it.

I used to work (retired now) for a public service. We could access anyone's details in the UK through our computer terminals.

Lesson number one on induction was if you ever search for a person's details, it will be logged and unless you have no legitimate business reason for the access, you will be sacked. No if's no buts no maybes.

As a manager, every day I would get a read out of whose accounts had been accessed, and by who. If any access seemed odd (accessing people out of our area, accessing people who shared a name with a member of staff ect) they would be highlighted and I would have to check why the account was accessed.

I would also have to find out why a,% of cases not highlighted had been accessed.

And yes, my regional manager would get similar reports about what we, their area mangers, were accessing.

I'm gobsmacked that your trust didn't take this issue seriously.

I used to many, many years ago, and I did do.
Thankfully it was dealt with very well.

From my experience people did it without any malicious intent but that obviously still doesn’t make it right.

I haven’t been part of the NHS for a very long time but I doubt much has changed in terms of records being accessed for wrong reasons, although I’m sure there’s much more training now.

So this story hasn't shocked me, but like I said I’m glad it has been put in the public eye and that the staff has been punished appropriately so people know that it is a serious offence.

Is it possible for someone to access the wrong record in error? There must be checks that stop you from pulling up the wrong file i guess, as that could cause a serious issue. I'm just thinking there's loads of people with the same name and dob, and you could type in a wrong nhs number. How do staff prevent errors?

Accidental post

How could the computer know that it's in error though, and not a legitimate reason? It's up to the person doing the search, anywhere I've worked at least.

I always found it a bit odd that when I worked in the NHS and we had to stay off whilst awaiting Covid results, it was our colleagues who we worked with on the ward, who accessed our records to print off our lab tickets for our sample, and who then kept accessing our online records to check to see if the results were back.

All we could do was hope that our colleagues were professional enough to only look at our lab specimen sample results, even though they could have seen and read absolutely everything else too.

Not Just embarrassed -I hope they never have access to any records ever again.

Thats what i mean, if its a sackable offence how do you eliminate the chance of making an error? I deal with a database of tens of thousands of people, i sometimes pull up the wrong record because the names or DOBs are the same, thankfully i'm not dealing with highly senitive medical data, so i don't face the sack.

Surely sometimes people must just make an honest error? Or how do they make certain to prevent it?

Poor parents of Barnaby and Grace and poor family of Ian. These HCP's were no doubt simply being ghouls. I have no idea why anyone would access records like this, we all know that there are digital footprints on every single record accessed and they must have known they'd be caught.

I don’t doubt that some of the accessing of records was done for dubious reasons, but there is a degree of interest and curiosity amongst medics.

I’m a GP, and when one of our patients dies the surgery gets notified (by the hospital, relatives or ambulance service). The receptionist who takes the call then sends a message to the whole practice staff to say that the patient has died.

Immediately all the doctors go into the patient’s records, to see if it was someone they’d treated. Or if it’s a patient that is known to us, we look to see what happened. As clinicians we are curious, and also we want to learn,

We don’t have personal lists, so any of the patients could potentially see us one day. I therefore don’t see this as a breach of confidentiality. A breach of confidentiality would be something like finding out that someone I knew had registered as a patient, and having a look in their records just for the hell of it.

I've previously accessed the wrong record of a patient with the same name as the one I'm searching. I've also accidentally clicked on the name directly above or below the person that I'm looking for. I will always record 'record accessed accidentally looking for patient with similar name' or whatever is the most applicable explanation. I know that not everybody does.

Two of the three victims had quite unusual names so I'd say that accidentally accessing them is quite unlikely.

Beyond IT policies though, professional ethics are drummed into you in training, including the rights to privacy and confidentiality and information sharing on a need to know basis. It’s the absolute basic of any professional practice in health care and social work.

Besides which basic human empathy would tell you that you’d not want someone accessing your records gratuitously, so you don’t look at others. They absolutely deserve to be sacked.

My first thought was clinicians changing records if they had had previous involvement with the accused. But also prurience yes

Thanks, i'm just interested bc i manage databases. I agree that it's almost impossible not to make the odd error, which would seem pretty unfair if you faced the sack every time you did it!

I also agree that in this case it would be pretty obvious that these incidences were not errors.