Health authorities have sacked one staff member allegedly involved in leaking sensitive patient records to an "industrial partner" and another two have been stood down, pending an investigation.
The Canberra Times can reveal the serious privacy breach from Canberra Health Services staff has been referred to the ACT Integrity Commission, as well as being the subject of a police investigation.
Canberra Health Services chief executive Dave Peffer confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that three staff had faced consequences over the breach.
He said one staff member had been terminated and two others were stood down and referred to the public sector standards commissioner.
Mr Peffer has said whole clinical records had been "deliberately emailed" outside of the organisation to an "industrial partner" over a period of years. He said the organisation became aware of the breaches in the weeks before he sent an all staff email on March 6 about the situation.
"A series of events, which I probably can't expand on, led us to the point that we felt concerned about information that might have left the organisation and an email audit then identified that patient information had left the organisation in an unauthorised way," he told The Canberra Times.
Due to the ongoing investigations Mr Peffer said he was constrained about what he could say. There are strict rules about what authorities can say when a matter is before the integrity commission.
Mr Peffer did not confirm or give any information about the "industrial partner" where the records were leaked but he did say Canberra Health Services still had an ongoing relationship with the partner.
"I make no suggestion about anything that's happened outside this organisation, all I can talk about is what's happened from within this organisation and we've made a terrible mistake," he said.
"That's what we've moved to address as quickly as we can."
Mr Peffer said he was confident only 13 patients had been affected by the breaches. The alleged breaches were committed by staff working in the mental health space.
He said the investigation would shed light on why staff had leaked these records. He said an incident such as this had broken the trust of the patients involved and their families and it raised broader questions for the community.
"For us as an organisation this has been a pretty distressing discovery," Mr Peffer said.
"If you think about the engagements that our patients have each and every day with their treating team, the folks that care for them, they're disclosing all sorts of information ... it's some of the most personal and private information that any individual could have.
"For a health service like ours we understand this is a business built on trust and when something like this happens it very quickly destroys that trust particularly for the patients involved but it gives rise to a range of questions that the community I think rightly asks about, such as why did this happen."
The breaches had sent "shockwaves through the organisation", Mr Peffer said.
"This is a truly extraordinary incident as team members join this organisation there's all sorts of protections and training that's undertaken to ensure that we handle people's private information appropriately," he said.
While he could not specify the profession of the staff members, Mr Peffer did say the workers were trained in their obligations around patient privacy and it was from a team that understood the importance of patient privacy.
He said he wrote to all staff about the "troubling experience" as he did not want to cover up the incident.
"It's not something we have attempted to cover up or sweep under the carpet. We have shone a light on it with 8000 team members to say this has happened and it's not what we're about," Mr Peffer said.
"When we damage the trust we have with our patients it can then actually curtail the willingness of our patients to confide in us and share some of their most personal and private information, which underpins the care we provide."
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