SA Health sacks three staff for snooping on patient records
UPDATED: SA Health have sacked three staff members since February for snooping on patient records without authorisation, the agency revealed today.
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Chief executive David Swan has confirmed the breaches took place before February 29, when the department publicly vowed to crack down on the inappropriate access of patient records in response to revelations of several breaches.
SA Health admitted at the time that 21 employees had been caught accessing records of at least nine patients, including those of Cy Walsh, who is facing court charged with the killing of his father, former Crows coach Phil Walsh.
Explaining why action has not been taken until now, Swan said: “We need to go through a natural [justice] process with our staff”.
“We’ve gone through a process to confirm those breaches and three employees have been terminated,” he said.
“We have to put the allegations to the employees in question and give them an opportunity to respond.
“We [also] have to actually put to the employee the disciplinary action we intend to take and give them an opportunity to respond, and this [process] takes several months.
“We have to… have enough evidence in front of us to make sure the decision to terminate is a reasonable decision.”
He said SA Health was committed to “transparency”, although he would not disclose any information about the staff in question, nor the nature of the files they accessed.
“We don’t and will never talk about any patient record,” Swan said.
“We’re not going to go into the staff in question… it doesn’t matter whether they’re doctors or nurses, admin staff, scientists – any employee within SA Health that inappropriately looks at a patient’s record will have their employment terminated.”
He emphasised that the breaches represented a small proportion of the “hundreds of thousands of transactions of information” that pass through the agency every week.
“As I have said many times, the vast majority of our staff do the right thing, acting professionally and with high ethical standards as they carry out their role,” he said.
In February, Health Minister Jack Snelling said SA Health would publicise the number of people disciplined for accessing confidential patient records every three months, adding: “I suspect this will show that it is a relatively infrequent occurrence.”
Cy Walsh is due to face court again for a directions hearing this week. The 13 SA Health staff who were previously caught having accessed his records were issued formal warnings.
