NHS breach helpline left staff carrying a 'significant emotional burden'
"This placed significant emotional burden on individuals working in the contact center, who were not prepared or provided support on how to deal with those." Members of the trust's clinical governance team were told just a day beforehand that they would staff the helpline.
Key points
- "Some staff had not finished reading the pre-prepared script which had arrived only 30 minutes before the center went live." Most call handlers only learned that their own data had been exposed while already working on the helpline, sometimes minutes before supporting others affected.
- How the spreadsheet slipped through Responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request thought to be from a journalist researching a story about stress in the NHS, the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust uploaded a spreadsheet to its public FOI Disclosure log in February 2023.
- This contained personal data and inadvertently exposed sickness absence information and sensitive health data related to 7,715 staff, 288 non-trust workers, as well as a small number of unidentified records.
NHS staff drafted into a helpline after colleagues' health data was exposed online faced distressed callers, safeguarding concerns, and a "serious emotional impact," a review has found.
Additional details
- "Such occurrences of anger or distress were not infrequent, and this reflected the heightened emotions and distress experienced by callers to varying degrees due to the breach," the review noted.
- Staff assigned to the helpline described difficult calls involving shouting, anger, and distress.
- "The staff working in the call centers had a short training session and then the calls started coming in within minutes of the team being set up," the review noted.
- According to officials speaking at a trust board meeting on Thursday, the review and its findings have since been circulated among staff, and published online.
- The review stated that some staff members gave up weekends and worked long past their scheduled hours to meet the demands of both roles.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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