NHS trust fined £180k over data breach affecting users of HIV service

The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined a NHS trust £180,000 over the release of email addresses of more than 700 users of an HIV service.

56 Dean Street, a Soho-based sexual health clinic within Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, offered a service – known as ‘Option E’ – to patients with HIV to receive test results and make appointments by email. Patients using the service also received an occasional newsletter. A small number of people who received the newsletter did not have HIV.

In March 2010 a member of staff in the trust’s pharmacy department sent a questionnaire to 17 patients in relation to their access to HIV treatment.

The email addresses were entered into the ‘to’ field instead of the blind carbon copy (‘bcc’) field. The recipients could therefore see the email addresses of all the other recipients.

The trust put in place some remedial measures following this security breach. However, it did not provide specific training to remind staff to double check that the group email addresses were entered into the correct field.

The Chelsea and Westminster also did not replace the email account it was using with an account that could send a separate email to each service user on the distribution list.

On 1 September 2015, a member of staff at the clinic sent a newsletter to the 781 subscribers of the Option E service.

The email addresses were, as in the previous incident, entered in error into the ‘to’ field instead of the ‘bcc’ field. This also meant the recipients could also see the email addresses of all the other recipients.

According to the ICO, some 730 of the 781 email addresses contained people’s full name. One service user had relocated to Essex and should have been removed from the distribution list.

The clinic did not inform the service users when they subscribed to Option E that their email addresses would be used to send newsletters to the other service users by bulk mail.

In its monetary penalty notice, the ICO found that the trust had contravened the provisions of the Data Protection Act by failing “to take appropriate technical and organisational measures against unauthorised processing of personal data in contravention of the seventh data protection principle at Part I of Schedule 1 to the DPA”.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said: “People’s use of a specialist service at a sexual health clinic is clearly sensitive personal data. The law demands this type of information is handled with particular care following clear rules, and put simply, this did not happen.

“It is clear that this breach caused a great deal of upset to the people affected. The clinic served a small area of London, and we know that people recognised other names on the list, and feared their own name would be recognised too. That our investigation found this wasn’t the first mistake of this type by the Trust only adds to what was a serious breach of the law.”

Graham added: “The Trust was quick to apologise for their mistake, and has undertaken substantial remedial work since the breach. Nevertheless, it is crucial that the senior managers at NHS Trusts understand the requirements of data protection law, and the serious consequences that follow when that law is broken.”

The Information Commissioner’s Office last week fined Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust £185,000 after it posted the private details of 6,574 members of staff on its website.