Hospital investigating loose medical documents

Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre is investigating why confidential patient records can be found on the streets surrounding the former Port Arthur General Hospital site.
"Ultimately this is our facility so we’re responsible for the security of those records and we take that very seriously and we will be continuing our investigation on this," said Lori Marshall, vice-president of medicine, cardiology, mental health and maternal child services.

The PAGH is undergoing demolition and through the process of salvaging some materials from the site, copies of medical records have been uncovered, said Marshall.

Those records have since been picked up by the wind and blown onto the sidewalks and streets along the construction site.

"I can assure the public that all of their original copies of the medical records were transferred to the new Thunder Bay Regional Hospital site at the point when we moved both from Port Arthur and McKellar back in 2004," Marshall said.

Hospital staff is taking measures to secure the site and are investigating how this could have happened.

"We’re also curious as to how it is this happened," she said. "We’re reviewing processes with our salvage company to make sure that we’re not going to get into this kind of situation again. We have been over to the site today and removed anything that would appear to us to be any kind of paper that would be floating around."

The records appear to be doctor order sheets that contains not only the patient’s personal information such as their address and date of birth, but the doctor’s orders and progress notes.

Marshall said the next step is to contact any patient whose privacy may have been breached. However, the only way to know which patients those are is by which documents are found and returned to the hospital.

"We have not contacted any patients yet because we are not yet sure what has occurred," she said. "We think this is really very much an isolated incident. This is something we weren’t expecting. We think we’ll be able to deal with this very quickly and it’s not something we perceive to be a long-term issue."