The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has signed an undertaking to comply with its requirements under the Data Protection Act, having fallen short in the past.
Patients whose data they were dealing with were offered an “opt-out” option for certain data being shared with other organisations, but this was not honoured. As such, anyone who opted out still had their information shared anyway without their consent.
The HSCIC has now reportedly agreed to take a series of steps and have signed an undertaking to ensure they comply with their obligations in the future.
A lot of the claims we help people for involve leaks or abuse of medical data given how highly sensitive and confidential it generally is. Although it’s understandable for anyone to be upset if their personal information is shared, it can be far worse when it’s medical information because of how personal it can be.
In this case here, HSCIC were responsible for handling medical data, and it was medical data that was unfortunately shared despite people asking to opt-out of it being shared.
Medical information was therefore shared without proper consent.
Given our line of work, we fully appreciate how distressing this can be.
In a statement from the ICO:
“People were given the choice to opt out of having their medical data shared in this way, and would have expected their decision to be respected. It was not. While we note the reasons for the delays around this, patients’ data has been processed unfairly and we have taken action to put that right.”
Leaks and Breaches
We help people for both, and in terms of applying the law, they’re more or less the same thing.
If you have had your medical data shared, leaked, or your rights to privacy generally breached, please contact us for help on 0800 634 75 75.