Joan Walters writes more in the Hamilton Spectator about an incident reported here yesterday:
Three investigations have been launched into patient confidentiality after sensitive health files from a Hamilton hospital were found in an Etobicoke dumpster.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare was trying yesterday to reach all seven families affected after records of their children’s stay in hospital in 2001 were retrieved from a fenced garbage area behind a coffee shop.
“We’ve reached two of them,” said Marnie Fletcher, St. Joseph’s chief privacy officer. “A couple of numbers are no longer valid so we’re trying to reach family doctors for more up-to-date information.”
Fletcher has been issuing apologies and also telling families the hospital has notified the office of Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner.
[…]
The records are copies of medical reports written by Dr. Aimal Sediq, who was a resident at St. Joe’s when the children were in hospital in 2001. A passerby found the files strewn behind Williams Coffee Pub, near Sherway Gardens mall.
Sediq is “on holiday,” according to his office in Brampton, where he now practises, and a babysitter at his home. The passerby who found the files said the coffee pub is managed by a relative of Sediq, and that the files were in a larger batch of papers that looked as if they came from a house cleaning.
Full story – Hamilton Spectator