back to article Another NHS trust coughs up £90k fine for lax fax acts

The taxpayer-backed NHS has suffered another fine from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for outing patients' private information to the wrong people. The Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust was slapped with a £90,000 ($142,000) penalty after the "serious breach of the Data Protection Act" that saw the …

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  1. mark 63 Silver badge
    FAIL

    Fax?

    FAX ????

    Any company that still uses those things (for reasons other than communicating with other backward companies) is obvioulsy never gonna get the hang of that fancy newfangled data protection and security malarky

  2. Crisp

    The trust had been faxing patient lists

    To where? The 1980's?

  3. localzuk Silver badge

    Ah, government entities

    Still a mainstay in the fax world. Schools still fax orders too.

    It takes them years to catch up and start using other methods to send things.

  4. a53

    Hmm

    Why, oh, why do they find the service which will only impact on patients instead of fining the humans who screwed up ?

  5. Thomas 18
    Meh

    ICO not Europe

    Where does this money go to? according to the ICO website it is a UK agency i.e. not Brussels banksters.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I got a fax of someones full records sent to a Fax machine I keep hooked up for the lulz

    I faxed back 'wrong phone number, please check', all nice and lovely

    Got a page faxed back telling me it was all my fault and what the hell was I doing being anonymous

    BWAHAHAHAHA

    Do I get the monies?

  7. Anonymous John

    Well, someone did.

    "The fact that this information was sent to the wrong recipient for three months without anyone noticing makes this case all the more worrying.”

    "That person eventually told Blighty's health service that they had been receiving the lists and had shredded them."

  8. Lockwood
    Flame

    FFS.

    NHS, stop dong silly things with data.

    ICO, stop fining the population for the NHS' error.

    I know I say this on each of these stories, but it's getting silly now.

    I still can't rememebr a private company that El Reg has reported being fined by the ICO, it's always either a local authority or the NHS.

  9. Jonathan Richards 1
    Stop

    Conversions

    What's that spurious conversion to a foreign currency (possibly USD) doing there? Why have you not mentioned the equivalence to, say, 18,065,110.88 Icelandic kronur?

  10. andreas koch
    Facepalm

    That really, REALLY helps,

    slapping a fine on the always-short-on-money NHS.

    The only outcome is, that there's 90 grand less to go around for the patients.

    And the nitwit who did it...

    Enter The Beautiful South: 'carry on regardless'

  11. John H Woods Silver badge

    I can beat this

    I was once faxed a full transcript and evidence for an employee disciplinary hearing. Apparently this Orange store employee was considered to have violated some purchasers privacy. I nearly died of irony.

  12. I think so I am?
    FAIL

    And all patient data to be online by 2015!!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Faxing still very much in use

    My Trust faxes all letters to GPs - albeit automagically to pre-programmed numbers. In the great scheme of things, probably reasonably safe, and quick.

    What is annoying is the way that Trusts which have adopted NHS.net email forbid all patient identifiable email to nhs.uk addresses. And the fact that although GPs get my email address on all my clinic letters, and can email me, there's no way in which I can email GPs about my patients - I have to dictate letters to them which are transcribed and faxed (see above).

    Quite a few other IT things are annoying too. But other things are improving.

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