Privacy

Mawarnkarra Health Service recently identified a data breach in the health data system. The breach enabled a very small number of qualified health practitioners to view files they did not have authority to view.

The breach occurred as a result of a glitch in the health data management system that did not immediately detect the unauthorised access. This glitch was immediately notified to the health data system administrators and has been fixed.
We are notifying you because we want to ensure our relationship with you continues and we want to be open and transparent with you. We take the privacy of your personal health information very, very seriously. We have no reason to believe that your information has been used or disclosed to any person not employed at MHS. However, we did want to notify you so that you were kept fully informed of what we were doing about this matter.

As a precaution, we have notified the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (the Privacy Commissioner).

I wish to emphasise that health practitioners have a legal and ethical duty to maintain patient privacy and there is no reason to believe that any information has been disclosed to anyone else.

Our audit procedures are very tight and comply with all legal and ethical requirements and our procedures enabled detection of this breach. Nonetheless we have implemented additional safeguards to ensure that your privacy is maintained to the highest standards.

If you have any concerns or you wish to discuss this, please contact our Senior Medical Officer, Dr Seema Basil on 08 91820851.

Joan Hicks
Chief Executive Officer