Concerns raised after hospital files found at Cork landfill

SERIOUS CONCERNS and questions have been raised following the discovery of thousands of confidential patient records in a former landfill site in east Cork.

The medical records, which date back to the 1970s and early 1980s, contain sensitive information including patient names and addresses of adults and children, and details of medical conditions and treatments.

The documents were unearthed this week on the former Killacloyne landfill site close to the village of Glounthaune, where excavation works are currently under way for the reopening of the Cork-Midleton railway line.

The HSE South has confirmed that hospital records from Cork Regional Hospital (now CUH) and St Finbarr’s Hospital have been found in the disused landfill site. HSE representatives met Cork County Council officials at the site yesterday.

“As soon as the HSE was notified, the information was treated with the utmost urgency and hospital staff immediately attended the site to assess the situation,” a HSE South spokeswoman stated.

She said the HSE was co-operating with the construction company and HSE security staff had been deployed to the site as nothing could be removed until it was inspected by the county council’s waste enforcement officer.

Cork city Senator Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) said public reassurance was needed and he called for an urgent debate on data protection and accountability of the HSE and the former southern health board.

Labour TD for Cork North Central Kathleen Lynch said she had a particular interest in finding out more information as she suspected that they included records which she was told by the HSE two years ago had been destroyed.

Ms Lynch said she put a Dáil question to Minister for Health Mary Harney in 2006, to ask what had happened to patient records in Cork, dating back to the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

“At that time, I was deeply concerned that documentation that patients needed to establish fully the manner in which their medical cases had been handled was not being made available to them. In reply, the HSE told me that the records in question had been ‘destroyed’. I understood that to mean that they had been shredded. It is now my fear that the records were in fact not destroyed, but were simply dumped in a landfill.”

Workers Party spokesman Denis O’Connor said the discovery of the files was extremely disturbing to the many thousands of people who were patients of the then Cork Regional Hospital and St Finbarr’s Hospital who now feared their personal files are among those unearthed.

The HSE spokeswoman said patients could be assured that since 1993, hospital records were confidentially archived and stored by a professional data storage company.

“Hospital records are, since the mid-1980s, stored indefinitely, ie not disposed of. Prior to that, certain inactive hospital records would have been sent for microfilming and then for appropriate disposal. The HSE is currently undertaking an in-depth investigation to establish the facts and determine how these files were disposed of inappropriately.”