Scot NHS Trust probes email stuffup involving maternity patients' data

A staff member sent the personal details of around 150 women who were in contact with a Scottish NHS Trust’s maternity services to their own personal email account, the Trust has revealed. NHS Forth Valley, the health board that oversees NHS services in the region between Edinburgh and Glasgow, said it is investigating the …

[JefcoPDrinkbeer]

A "fully qualified, non-clinical staff member, and not a junior" ought to know better and this should be grounds for gross misconduct dismissal.

[Doctor Syntax]

It's a very odd bit of wording. What does "concerned" mean? At first sight it might mean that such a member of staff sent it but given that it was for analytic purposes perhaps it meant that it was the staff member's work that was being analysed in which case if they were identifiable from the contents then they're also one of the victims.

[Phil O'Sophical]

And if it was a junior, their manager should be the one dismissed, for lack of training and supervision.

[Doctor Syntax]

As far as I can make out this information was never in the public domain. That means that the incident was very badly communicated to the patients affected if that wasn't made clear.

[Anonymous Coward]

UK != England

Scotland does NOT have health trusts, nor do Scots have NHS numbers. Try again with health boards and community health index. I suspect that health trusts are called that because you should not trust them with your data (before it is siphoned off by Palantir). A bit like putting 'democratic' in the names of DPRK, DRC, GDR, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK != England

The community health index is still an NHS number, it just has a different name and begins with a different prefix to those in England/Wales or NI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK != England

Well yes and no but more no than yes.

It is a number and is used by the NHS in Scotland, that much is true but it's not a cross border thing - if you move from Scotland to England you'll be assigned a new "English" NHS Number and your CHI may be filed as a bit of extra data alongside it. If you move from England to Scotland you'll be assigned a CHI Number. Just to really mess things up there is still an old(er) "Scottish" NHS Number but that's not something that's used everyday.

You wont routinely be identified by CHI Number when interacting with the NHS outside Scotland and you won't routinely be identified by NHS Number when interacting with the NHS in Scotland.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK != England

Also, you don't pay for meds if you fill a perscription outwith Scotland. The English/Welsh/NI pharmacy claims the money back from NHS Scotland on a electronic transfer that is called the 'foreign form'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK != England

Nope on the prefix, CHI starts with DOB

[Ensign Nemo]

Re: UK != England

I always found it odd that your Scottish CHI number discloses your date of birth to anyone that asks for your CHI. It seems unnecessarily public.

Same with UK driving license numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK != England

Licence numbers.

[david 12]

Email stuffup?

Data handling fail. Unauthorized data access*.

But using an email system correctly, to do what email systems do correctly, under intentional action, is not an "email stuffup"

*In the sense that taking data offsite is unauthorized.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm

(Pregnant) pause for thought.

[Anonymous Coward]

You Must Be Joking!

In 2017 the Royal Free Trust (Hampstead, London) sent 1.6 million citizen

medical records to Google/DeepMind (Finchley, London).

Not one citizen was asked for consent!

Ofcom did NOTHING!

Now you tell me that there is outrage in Scotland about 150 email addresses!

Did I mention that GDPR is a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be inclusive

> A staff member sent the personal details of around 150 women who were in contact with a Scottish NHS Trust’s maternity services

An NHS workforce participant experienced an information governance event involving approximately 150 pregnancy-experienced, pregnancy-capable, and birth-adjacent gestational service users, irrespective of sex assigned at birth, gender identity, lived experience, or reproductive anatomy.