Hospital Management Investigation

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:14): Earlier, the minister in his ministerial statement said that these matters were only identified through monitoring of our electronic medical records. Can the minister outline to the house whether this was a routine monitoring and whether there are audit procedures which exist or whether this was just peculiar to this particular case?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:15): I think the fact that we have detected another eight instances over the year would suggest that it didn't just happen in this one particular case, but can I publicly warn all SA Health staff that inappropriate access of patient files is viewed very seriously by the department and very seriously by me as minister. There is no excuse for looking inappropriately at a patient's files. Obviously, we have to make patient medical records available to clinical staff because, in treating patients, they do need information as to what previous treatments that patient may have had in our system.

Electronic medical records go a long way to improving the quality of health care, because that information is readily available to our clinicians, but we expect our clinicians to abide not only by the rules of the department but by their own professional ethics which tell them that they should not be intruding on patient privacy and looking, as nosy parkers, into patient records that they have no right to look at. There is absolutely no excuse for that.

I am not going to go into how the department goes about monitoring access to records any more than the police minister would be telling publicly where the random breath testing stations are going to be on Friday night, because to do so would compromise our ability to catch people when they do the wrong thing. I have to say that, while I am extremely angry that these 13 and a further eight have inappropriately accessed patient records, we have over 30,000 people working in SA Health. This is a very rare occurrence, and the South Australian public should have confidence that this happens very rarely and, on the rare occasion when it does happen, these people get caught and appropriate action is taken against them.

Mr van Holst Pellekaan: How do you know who you haven't caught?

The SPEAKER: The member for Stuart is called to order.