Unashamedly linking to a post by a certain Dick Puddlecote on the National Death Service blog regarding this story.
Royal Bolton Hospital 'Lose' A&E Patients' Personal Details
More than 1,000 patients of the Royal Bolton Hospital have been contacted after their personal details were lost near the hospital grounds.
The hospital said the documents fell from a waste container which was taking them to be destroyed on 30 January.
The documents contained the names, addresses and dates of birth of patients who had recently attended A&E and other departments.
The hospital has assured patients their care will not have been affected.
Great. It may well lead to an identity theft though.It's amazing how little information a criminal needs to steal your identity. These are some of the most commonly-used items:Your full name, date of birth and address – data you are likely to carry in your wallet every day on items such as your driving licence
Or just might be picked up off the ground from a Bolton hospital. Why did they not just shred them?
How could this happen? Surely patients' details should be paramount?
Maybe, except that this was what the same hospital was spending its time (and cash, no doubt) releasing to the media the day before the data loss story hit.
Total smoking ban at the Royal Bolton hospital
SMOKING will be banned from the entire Royal Bolton Hospital site from July 1 this year, health chiefs have revealed.
Patients, visitors and staff are already prohibited from lighting up in any of the buildings and under canopies at entrances.
But the new rule means they will no longer be allowed to smoke anywhere in the grounds of the hospital. Hospital bosses say they have taken the decision because they want to promote healthier lifestyles.
Followed by blah blah smoking bad, rhubarb rhubarb non-smokers more equal, wibble wibble we're right-on.
Fail
6 comments:
I bet that this is happening all the time. The bureaucrats are so religiously crusading against the evils of smoking that they don't have time to use the shredders
Physician, heal thyself.
We've had a 'total smoking ban' at our local hospital for a couple of years; only the staff pay it any attention, having to walk a few hundred yards to the (unenclosed) bus stop for a fag.
Visitors and patients still huddle outside the doors smoking, trying not to trip over the pipes of the ventilators and portable drips. What can they do to enforce it other than take out a civil court action for trespass ?
The Information Commissioner reports one data loss per day, how many are covered up because the guilty reckon they will not be caught out ? Last year two similar caches of personal data were found strewn around a roundabout near Exeter airport, it never was discovered where they came from.
Dick,
Your two consecutive posts on Drink and Smoking got me thinking and so I blogged about this evil that is quasi-Religious unreason using fake science as a shield.
Back to priorities. The lack of priorities is shocking. It is because the Bureaucracy is a series of self-preserving silos. That is the nature of the beast - the fact is it needs regular cutting back and the only way such things can happen is for their to be motive. While it is a State run monopoly. the motive is non-existent.
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