Baroness Byford – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Byford on 2014-05-07.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, Dr Daniel Poulter MP, on 18 March (HC Deb, 574W), how many of the 145 serious data breaches reported for acute trusts were the result of theft; how many individuals were involved; how many trusts were implicated; and how many trusts were involved in more than one such breach.

Earl Howe

In the period from 1 June 2013 to 14 March 2014 where details of serious incidents have been reported through the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) Incident Reporting tool there have been 21 breaches reported by acute trusts under the categories of either ‘lost or stolen’ hardware or paperwork. Seven of these are verified as theft and 14 are possible thefts but this has not been proven. 19 trusts each reported a single incident and one reported two.

The numbers of individuals affected are indicated in the volume column of following table.