NHS patient records end up on eBay
Published September 17th, 2007
An NHS hard drive that turned up on eBay was found to contain patient data despite having supposedly been wiped.
The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust claimed that it was unaware of how the hard drive containing details of cancer patients found its way onto the auction website, as it was supposed to have been overwritten by private contractors.
“There is an ongoing investigation into this incident involving very senior people and we are looking at possible loopholes in the system,” said the trust in a statement.
“There is no record of this machine going through the systems that Siemens has in place for disposing of equipment. We cannot have something like this happening again.”
A spokesman for the Trust said that it is trying to trace the route the drive took to eBay, which includes “the possibility of theft”.
The discovery was made as part of a research project sponsored by BT, which aims to highlight the problem of personal data falling into the wrong hands.
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