Kent NHS trust sends patient data to landfill
The personal information of 1.6m people has been put at risk after a CD was sent to a landfill site by an NHS trust by mistake, a watchdog has said.
The Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust put the CD in a filing cabinet during an office move.
The cabinet was sent to landfill and the data has not been recovered.
The Information Commissioner' s Office said the CD contained the name, address, date of birth, NHS number and GP of hundreds of thousands of people.
Chief executive Ann Sutton said the trust had carried out an investigation and made several changes since the incident.
These include staff training and new guidance when moving offices, she added.
She said: "While the breach was unfortunate, I would like to reassure patients that the data stored in the filing cabinet was not current - the most recent information was from 2002.
"There was no clinical data involved and the data is beyond retrieval."