BREAKING - "staff tried to access Kates medicals...."

[DistinguishedSocialCommentator]

on talk tv at 21-04

and daily mirror

Disgusting if true

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/royals/kate-middleton-meghan-royal-live-32362675

Why shouldn’t the information be publicly available that this hospital is not protecting its patients, or complying with Data Protection procedures for reporting a serious breach to the ICO? If you had been a patient there, wouldn’t you want to know about this or any other hospital that holds your records? And if KP “leaked” it? Well if it’s a fact that this is happening, why do you think they would call attention to it? Maybe the media and SM nutters need to know that their thirst for information on Catherine has gone far over the line into illegality.

Beacuse it makes the individual who has the information and passes it on feel powerful? Because they get paid for it? Because they can? In some organisations it is very common.

The Leveson Enquiry went into quite a bit of detail about serving police officers with a sideline in leaking to the press.

To get ahead of the story. You'd never keep it quiet for long so it's better for the hospital to be seen to be tackling it energetically.

It’s awful news.

With yesterday’s announcement about the cancer It now seems clear what this data breach was all about. Sounds like parts of the press had been made aware of the information before the announcement. I do hope this isn’t why Catherine had to go public with the video.

I was thinking that exact thing.

It's awful if that is the case.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be hounded like that when you want to rest and recover.Some people were speculating about her marriage because they'd not been given their tidbits of gossip about her health. It was awful to read some of the posts on here.

In an average nhs hospital anyone’s records are available for anyone with access to the system, so all nurses and doctors as a minimum. Obviously where I work we aren’t treating royalty…..saying that we do get some celebs occasionally.

There is no lock but after you’ve viewed someone’s notes your name is added to a visible list saying who has looked at the notes. There are random audits done checking everyone who looked had a right to look. And if someone complains saying they think their nurse neighbour has looked then that can be checked.

Im not sure how feasible it is to “lock” an individual patient’s notes. It would depend if that feature is in the software the hospital uses I guess. Yes it’s possible to write software with this feature but they may not use software with this feature. Though if they regularly treat major celebs and royalty you’d like to think they do use such software. Maybe they just rely on registered healthcare professionals actually being professional. If caught they’ll be struck off for this and never work again.

I said watch or lock. So watch then. They'll have been running audits on it for sure

Oh definitely. And how stupid of staff to think someone wouldn’t have been checking.

Sorry but is no one else seeing a grown adult referring to a computer as a “pooter”, in front of God and Mumsnet?

There are systems where records can be locked, my workplace is one of them. For example, a patient who has featured in recent news stories as the victim of a crime, you cannot access their notes without entering a password.

True, but I'm not sure if the NHS has that system atm.
Staff are trained and often reminded about accessing notes on a need-to-know basis when appropriate.

I've said this before, FM's may recall a few years back when officers were pulled up for looking at the records inappropriately of people and these inc lovers, ex lovers, people who lived next door, family members etc. We don't hear about stuff like that these days as I'm guessing there are warnings on the site as you log in about the consequences of searching recording inappropriately and I gues they are audited every so often.

A slightly different scenrio is where the police, one send a whatsapp/sm media video re crime scene that is not allowed and those receiving it send it on and I think this has happened in recent times and officers were fired.

Having access to peoples personal records, famous or not, staff have a duty to not to disclose their records inappropriately

Staff who take seriously the rules about data use will have no problem and most staff be it nhs/hospitals/police/councils/dvla etc etc are honest and hard-working people who work within the rules.

Records are more likely to be breached by a cyber /hackattack rather than an individual looking up your personal details.

I work in an NHS hospital which uses this system. There are many of them all over the country which use the same.

I hope the staff involved are severely disciplined. Patient confidentiality has to be paramount. There'll be an audit trail of who tried to extract what information, so easy to trace.