Victim of NHS creep
NHS worker stole contact details and sent barrage of texts
A woman harrassed by a hospital worker who stole her contact details from her file has told how he almost broke up her relationship.
Andrew Stewart sent a barrage of texts and WhatsApp messages to the St Leonards woman for months, putting a massive strain on her 12-year relationship.
The nuisance texts – from a man she didn’t know – got so bad that her partner questioned whether she was “having an affair”.
Stewart last week avoided jail after admitting breaching the Data Protection Act and threatening or abusive behaviour.
That’s after the radiology assistant stole private information from patients files at Hairmyres and Crosshouse Hospitals, texting at least 16 women over a five-year period.
An aesthetic consultant, one of his victims had met Stewart only briefly – and supposedly professionally – at Hairmyres Hospital when he took an x-ray of her broken ankle.
Wishing not to be named, she told the News: “It was a few months down the line I ended up getting loads of WhatsApp messages.
“It was every other weekend and it was always in the morning. They would say, ‘I woke up with your number in my phone’.
“But I don’t go out. I don’t go to the dancing or that, I’ve a family and kids.
“I would text back and say, ‘you’ve got the wrong number,’ or ask how he got my number and it would stop. But then a few weeks later it’d happen again.
“It’s left me feeling quite anxious and it caused a lot of problems with partner.”
“I always just leave my phone around the house, so if it kept pinging with the same kind of message from the same guy all the time, my partner would see it.
“He thought I must know this guy and wondered how he had my number, and why was he texting me.
“He’d always call himself Andy Smith. It got to the stage it started causing problems in my relationship – my partner thought I was having an affair, that’s how bad it was.”
Hamilton Sheriff Court heard last week how Stewart gained access to patient records “without clinical or administrative reasons,” with a 2018 investigation claiming he had stolen the private information of more than 100 women.
His illegal activity spanned more than five years, between March 2013 and August 2018, with most of the women named in the charges contacted during 2017 and 2018.
Stewart would call the women, generally aged 25 to 35, after they’d attended his department for x-rays. Often he would claim that their number was in his phone and he didn’t know how it got there.
One of his victims had suffered years of domestic abuse and was living with posttraumatic stress disorder when he contacted her.
He was busted when a woman went to Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock for a followup appointment and saw the name ‘Andy’ on a staff member’s badge.
She recognised Stewart from a picture he had sent and realised he must have got her details from the hospital.
This was the starting point for an investigation, but management allowed Stewrt to continue working whilst they carried out the investigation, even AFTER he admitted the data breach, claiming it was a “random act” and he’d never done it before.
However, it turned out he had been doing this for years and had contacted dozens of women.
Our source was eventually contacted by NHS Lanarkshire about the breach and subsequent investigation, but only after they had sent the letter to her old address.
She only found out about the criminal charges, conviction and sentencing of Stewart after reading about it in the EK News and says she is angry at how the health board have dealt with the situation.
She added: “I’ve got very little trust in the NHS and have had very little correspondence about the whole situation, despite being told I would be kept in the loop and contacted along the way.
“I’m not very happy with how it has been handled. I think he should have been given a harsher sentence and the fact that he was still working whilst being investigated is shocking.
“At first I thought someone was on the wind-up, but it certainly didn’t turn out to be funny.”