Outrage as 999 worker puts picture of casualty on Facebook
AN emergency worker who took a picture of a casualty and posted it on Facebook has been sacked from the Scottish Ambulance Service.
The case has emerged along with that of a second person who posted details of a medical emergency they attended on the social media site.
In the latter case, the culprit escaped with just a warning from the ambulance service. It has raised fears NHS staff are getting away with shocking breaches of confidentiality on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Patients can no longer trust medical staff to keep their records safe, it has emerged, as three data protection breaches a week take place across Scotland.
In NHS Forth Valley, nine of these concerned ‘ misuse of social media’, with only two breaches ending in dismissal.
The other workers involved were given warnings or offered
‘It is clearly unacceptable’
counselling after posting confi- dential information online.
The figures, revealed by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, come three years after Scott Jenkins, a worker with the Scottish Ambulance Service, was jailed for four months.
He was reported by a colleague after pointing a camera phone at a patient’s private parts as she lay half-naked in his ambulance in 2008.
The l atest abuses at the Scottish Ambulance Service, revealed after a Freedom of Information request, took place between 2011 and 2014. Those involved have not been named.
Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It is clearly unacceptable that staff at the Scottish Ambulance Service have thought that they could post such confidential details on social media. It is completely right that they should be disciplined but we question whether that it is enough of a deterrent.’
She added: ‘Urgent action is therefore needed to ensure that medical records are kept safe and the worst data breaches are taken seriously.’
Data breaches are currently treated as civil cases, so offenders cannot be jailed and are not given a criminal record. In the four years of the study, there were 634 data breaches.
In NHS Lothian, there were six cases of records being accessed out of ‘personal interest’. Those responsible were offered counselling. Three quit and a court case is pending.
In NHS Grampian, a worker received a disciplinary warning. Other breaches involved carelessness, with staff at Greater Glasgow and Clyde losing an unencrypted memory stick and an agency worker leaving case files for patients at a bus stop. An ambulance service spokesman said: ‘There are robust policies and procedures in place for the management of patient data in line with information governance standards and these are reinforced with staff training on an ongoing basis.’ A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘ We take patient confidentiality and security of patient information very seriously and believe any data breach is unacceptable and will be reported, investigated and acted upon.’