The discovery of 19 patient files from a temporary flu assessment clinic on a downtown city street earlier this month reinforces the need for stricter security over such records, say two retired registered nurses from Corner Brook.

Last March, Marjorie Deckert and Eva Joan Lee publicly voiced their concerns about the number of health care professionals who could be permitted access to a patient’s medical record.

According to the two, it is possible that any of up to 11 different groups of health care professionals are able to access such records, even if the patient has never been referred to some of them.

The incident which happened Nov. 6 involved a medical staff member walking home from the clinic. The staff member accidentally lost the records of 19 people who had visited the flu assessment clinic set up at the former Regina High School building earlier that day. The records were found on the sidewalk by a passerby who brought them to The Western Star.

All 19 assessment forms were returned to Western Health.

While it’s not quite the same issue they raised concerns about earlier this year, Deckert and Lee said the recent incident does raise questions about people’s faith in the security of their medical information.

Such information, they said, should at least be transported in a secure container of some sort, so it won’t accidentally fall out unnoticed by who’s carrying them.

In response to the story published in the Nov. 10 edition of The Western Star, Western Health stated it was common for medical staff to sometimes take records home with them.
Deckert and Lee also took exception to that practice.

“Neither of these methods provides the declared privacy and confidentiality to which a patient is entitled,” Deckert and Lee said in a prepared statement to The Western Star.

“A similar event of medical information being taken outside the health facility in St. John’s resulted in private medical information being sent to the United States.”

Protecting the privacy of medical information goes beyond how such data is handled directly by health care professionals, added the nurses. In June, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner announced an investigation into Crown attorneys allegedly accessing confidential police databases to run background checks on prospective jurors. The information contained within those police profiles could possibly hold snapshots of the individuals’ medical histories.

There is no evidence of Crown attorneys, or defence counsel for that matter, doing that sort of thing in Newfoundland and Labrador, but Deckert and Lee said such news makes them think how private one’s personal records truly are.

“It could very well be happening, with so many people having access to your files,” Deckert told The Western Star.

A story in Wednesday’s newspaper reported a Supreme Court decision involving a woman who sued a physician or not providing her with an adequate standard of care after she was injured during a surgery he performed on her.

The graphic details of that woman’s medical ordeal are now a matter of public record since there was no publication ban on her identity.

Deckert said while litigation in a public forum is a decision deliberately made by the woman and her family, it is nonetheless another avenue which puts personal information out in the public domain for anyone to see.