Two doctors surveyed their colleagues at a teaching hospital in London and found that 92 out of 105 held unsecured memory sticks, 79 held confidential patient information but only 5 were password protected. The authors said this is a clear breach of data security, reported the BBC.
They claim that the findings reflect the lack of security across UK hospitals and beyond.
Although hospitals issue doctors with chip-and-pin cards to access NHS databases and patient records, many doctors increasingly rely on their own memory sticks to store patients data tradidtionally written in doctors' notebooks.
The DH said "any breach of patient security is unacceptable…...The NHS locally has legal responsibility to comply with data protection rules." The survey is published in today's Health Service Journal.
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