Patients’ details discovered on street

The discovery on a Co Louth street of four pages of doctor’s notes containing patients’ details has been reported to the Data Protection Commissioner.

A member of the public found the consultant’s report, which contained the names and dates of birth of at least 18 patients and the units they were treated in at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.

The man, who made the discovery, on a street near the hospital, handed the documents in to local radio station LMFM. The station returned the documents to the HSE.

Sheila O’Connor, spokeswoman for patient advocacy group Patient Focus, said the apparent data breach in relation to patients attending Our Lady of Lourdes was the third such incident since 2015.

In September 2015, files containing patient data were found near a bin outside the hospital, prompting an investigation by both the HSE and the Data Protection Commissioner. The files contained clinical information about patients.

At the time, the hospital said it had “facilities in place for the safe disposal of sensitive and confidential information”.

In 2016, a document containing information relating to 13 patients was found in the vicinity of the hospital grounds. The hospital said at the time that it was “committed to learning from this issue”.

Ms O’Connor said there was no point in the hospital having policies and procedures in place to protect patient data unless they were implemented.

“Policies and procedures are all very well but they need to be acted on. If I was one of those patients, I’d be contacting a solicitor,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Data Protection Commissioner said: “I can confirm that a breach notification has been made to the Data Protection Commissioner by the HSE and the office is liaising with them on the matter.”

The RCSI hospital group, which handles communications on behalf of the Drogheda hospital, failed to respond to Irish Examiner requests for a comment.