Info commissioner blasts health department on privacy legislation
Minister says mandatory training being developed
Shane Magee
Northern News Services
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The territory's privacy watchdog is disappointed the Department of Health and Social Services hasn't done more to protect private patient information.
Information and Privacy Commissioner Elaine Keenan Bengts spoke about protecting patient privacy when she presented to a committee of MLAs at the legislative assembly Oct 20. - Shane Magee/NNSL photo |
The GNWT implemented the Health Information Act last fall, designed to protect privacy and with a provision requiring notification of breaches.
The first day the law was in place, she received the first complaint. It was one of eight cases during the 2015-16 fiscal year her office dealt with related to the new law.
"It should have changed significantly the way that health institutions in the Northwest Territories deal with personal health information but there has been no apparent change at all," wrote Information and Privacy Commissioner Elaine Keenan Bengts in her annual report tabled last month in the legislative assembly.
She called the piece of legislation overly confusing and said it needs fixes, only a year after it became law.
Her report was critical of the department for the amount of training it has provided to employees who have access to medical records.
"I was disappointed in the preparation that the health sector was given for this act," Keenan Bengts told a committee of MLAs Oct. 20.
She said the training wasn't mandatory, was done in a hurry and was aimed at medical staff instead of clerical staff who often are the "gatekeepers" to sensitive information.
Health Minister Glen Abernethy said in an interview last week it's still early in the life of the new law that came into effect last October.
"We're continually striving to ensure that our staff are trained," he said.
"There was a lot of training prior to it going live and there's continual and ongoing training. We take the privacy commissioner's report very seriously and we're committed to ensuring the privacy of residents of the Northwest Territories."
He said since June 2015, 338 people working in the health system have received Health Information Act training.
It's a fraction of the 1,460 positions in the territory's 2016-17 budget for the health department.
He acknowledged more needs to be done.
"We do need to get training out to all of our staff," he said, adding the department is developing a mandatory privacy training policy.
Few, if any, health authorities had yet to properly implement policies related to protecting information, Keenan Bengts' report noted.
She said electronic medical records were supposed to increase protections yet the system lacks the ability to limit access to certain information even though the law is supposed to enable those restrictions.
"More people than you'd ever think have access to your medical records," she told MLAs.
She was asked during the committee meeting whether any Canadian jurisdictions had implemented the restrictions on access to records she suggests are needed.
She didn't directly answer but said medical professionals don't like the restrictions because they feel like they need the most information possible when considering a person's medical condition.
Those restrictions are particularly important in the North, she said, where neighbours or others have access to medical information a patient may not want them to see.
"It becomes more and more important that those checks and balances be in place and that the public know that they are in place," she said.
