this is not

anything new, it may just be the first time its been reported though...

down in the south, various abandoned hospitals in the area - including psychiatric and pediatric institutes - still have photographs, files and in more then one contracts with drug suppliers laying about discarded on the floor.

you can find more by googling "urbex UK" - some even have photographs of the documents, xrays, files and contracts that have been found.

@arran

With you there, and not just dahn sarf either.

Lots of former asylums and psychiatric facilities (all the ones that haven't been turned into nasty little 'luxury' flats anyway) are pretty Marie Celeste like, they look like all the staff and patients just wandered off, which sadly is more or less the case.

A word of warning though for anyone tempted to pop down to their local abandoned NHS facility and have a shufty for confidential docs : derelict buildings exert a gravitational pull on smack heads, and not all the pshyce patients wandered off, some still live amongst the ruins of their former homes, even decades later, it is achingly, heart breakingly sad. Never urbex alone. And remember, when it rains, no drains!

safe disposal

It's perfectly obvious that the government and it's departments have no idea of the value of personal information. The general attitude seems to be "if it's not about me, it's not important."

Once upon a time, paper records such as these would just be taken out and burnt on a bonfire. But in this more enlightened age we know the damage caused by CO2...

Urbex

Pop-up infested adware advert shite on the first page, no thanks!

Paper Light NHS - What a Joke!

I work for a GP surgery and have just started to work through the mountain of paper work generated by the IG Toolkit! It's a waste of time and resouces, just someone at the top who wants safegard their job for another couple of months/years without thinking about the impact it has on the GP and more importantly their staff! There are 30 different reports to produce and work through, then there are the countless "Management Speak" documents to produce and printout to be displayed for no one to read!

I'm burried in piles of paper, each month there are paper reports that have to sent to our PCT then each quarter there is even more. The final straw has to be the QOF points we earn, the paperwork that produces is a complete joke.

We are being encouranged not to print so much but we have to in order to report our figures each month as there is no "secure" system for reporting.

The NHS were informed months before

and did feck all about it in the case of the Dundee site. Perhaps they were using the time to put all the data on an unencrypted hard drive then sell it on Ebay.

Mines the doctor sticking 38% more wages in his jacket for doing less work.

Is it really that surprising...

that the NHS, top heavy as it is with senior management with little or no direct clinical experience or inclinations, produces such a vast quantity of report generating drivel such as the IG Toolkit? Really? It's not about information security, nor about patient protection, just as the NHS stopped being about servicing the nation's health as soon as bullsh*t speaking senior management types were introduced into the system. Targets breed reports on those targets, those reports generate more reports on the failure to meet those (often ridiculous) targets, failure reports generate more reports and action plans, action plans generate progress reports... The paper trail goes on, the management gravy train continues to roll and the patients are forgotten.

Nothing New

About 20 years ago I was inspecting the redundant and empty buildings of the Holloway Institution a psychiatric hospital near Virginia Water in Surrey, and in the undercroft we found admissions ledgers from the forties and fifties. There was a resident security guard who collected them up but what he did with them I've no idea.

Surely there needs to be a simple statement of policy that no NHS body of any sort will ever abandon records and that when any practice, department or hospital is closed the disposal of its records becomes the responsibility of the board or comittee or trust or whatever up the food chain.