A senior hospital manager has been suspended after a laptop containing
the confidential details of 21,000 patients was stolen.

The manager, from the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation
Trust, is understood to have the left the password-protected computer
in the car while it was parked in Edinburgh on June 18th.

It has on it unencrypted names, dates of birth and treatment plans and
a police investigation had been launched.

Peter Murphy, chief executive of the trust, wrote to apologise to the
affected patients on North Essex and said there was a "very small
chance that patient details can be accessed."

He said because of the password, only authorised staff could access
the details.

He added: "We are holding an investigation into how this incident
occurred and its consequences and have suspended the member of staff
involved until the investigation concludes."

Mr Murphy said the Trust acknowledged that patient data should not be
stored unencrypted on a laptop and he had previously written to staff
with such computers reminding them of this.

He said: "Patients and the public should be reassured that the Trust
takes security and patient confidentiality very seriously."

On affected patient, Brian Loring, 71, described the situation as a
"massive breach of trust".

Mr Loring, a retired insurance broker from Holland-on-Sea, Essex, who
had a defribrillator fitted at the hospital in 2005, said: "I feel
very, very uncomfortable and vulnerable that a thief has my personal
details in his hands. It would be very easy to commit identity fraud
with the information they have.

"What I don't understand is why the information was on a laptop in the
first place. It is stored on the hospital mainframe - which could have
been accessed remotely.

"It is shameful the information wasn't encrypted. It's a flagrant
disregard of my privacy - a massive breach of trust."

A trust spokesman said he did not know why the laptop had been taken
to Scotland and said managers believed the data would "almost
certainly" be wiped by a thief for a quick sale. Patients who had not
been contacted by the hospital were not affected.

He added that no personal data had been lost because the files on the
stolen computer were copies.

Earlier this month computers containing the details of 20,000 patients
were stolen from a hospital in Tooting, London, while a laptop with
the health records of 11,000 people were stolen from the home of a
doctor in Wolverhampton.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2223548/Hospital-manager-suspe...