Health authorities will reveal quarterly on a website how many SA Health staff have been disciplined for inappropriately accessing patient records, South Australian Health Minister Jack Snelling has promised.
It is in response to revelations that 21 employees were caught snooping in recent months, 13 of them at medical records of accused killer Cy Walsh, who is charged with the murder of Phil Walsh when he was Adelaide Crows coach.
Mr Snelling said data would be published online each quarter, with the first expected to be publicised in late May.
“Every three months the Government, on the SA Health website, will make available the number of people who have been disciplined for accessing confidential patient records. I suspect this will show that it is a relatively infrequent occurrence,” he said.
“It is very important for me, as Health Minister, that the SA public have complete confidence in our health system and complete confidence that their privacy will be protected.”
Meanwhile, an Adelaide man who was among 10 cancer patients given wrong chemotherapy doses remains adamant a judicial inquiry is needed into the security and handling of medical records.
The Health Minister said the chemotherapy issue had prompted him to ask SA Health to develop clear guidelines on when health incidents would be publicised in future.
“We have to balance the rights of the patient — not every patient when something goes wrong wants to be reading about it in the newspapers or seeing about it on the TV news — but against that we also have to balance the needs of the public,” Mr Snelling told reporters.
“The general public do have a right to know when we make a mistake.”
Cancer patient Andrew Knox said the minister’s response still would not get to the bottom of why his under-dosing happened.
“If self-reporting [errors] worked, the department would have known immediately that I was under-dosed unnecessarily, not six months later. That only came out because of the media [investigating],” he said.
Mr Knox said his medical records were not intact and he still thought a judge would be best placed to work out what went wrong.