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WorkSafe working to fix fax privacy breaches

A Langford businessman who has been receiving faxes containing personal medical information of WorkSafe B.C. clients for several years has been contacted by the agency and told of the steps underway to rectify the privacy breach.
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Leslie Wilson has received hundreds of pages of faxes meant for a Victoria medical imaging office.

A Langford businessman who has been receiving faxes containing personal medical information of WorkSafe B.C. clients for several years has been contacted by the agency and told of the steps underway to rectify the privacy breach.

Trevor Peirce said he had a “good talk” with a WorkSafe official on Thursday, the same day the situation was detailed in the Times Colonist, about the dozen or so faxes he has received since 2010.

“She seemed very interested in finding out what department was sending these faxes so she can look into this internally,” Peirce said. “I was told their privacy office had already been notified of this incident and she’d be following up with them as well to let them know the steps that have been taken to rectify this.”

WorkSafe spokesman Scott McCloy said the organization takes such breaches extremely seriously and wants to do everything in its power to prevent a reoccurrence. WorkSafe sends out 40,000 faxes and more than 100,000 claims-related pieces of mail per month but even one breach is too many, he said.

“We’re a public organization — people should be holding us to a higher standard.”

When Peirce and his staff contacted WorkSafe previously, they were asked to destroy the faxes, which contained patients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, B.C. CareCard numbers, details of their injuries and their signatures. He said no one seemed interesting in finding out more information to make the faxes stop.

WorkSafe policy states that any employee who learns of a possible privacy breach must immediately notify a superior. The superior is to assess the breach “without delay” and take action to contain it.

“I’m quite satisfied with this response; however, this is what I expected to have happened in 2010 without needing a newspaper article to get their attention,” Peirce said.

Privacy breaches are “extremely rare,” McCloy said, but do occur from time to time through human error. WorkSafe continues to use faxes because email can be routed through unsecured servers, he said.

Meanwhile, a Victoria couple who went public Wednesday about receiving more than 200 pages containing personal patient information have not heard from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which is investigating the breaches, or West Coast Medical Imaging, where the faxes were meant to go.

Leslie Wilson said she and her husband, Barry, are not surprised to be out of the loop.

“It is exactly what has happened each and every time we have tried to get this situation addressed,” she said. “We would have been more surprised if there had been phone calls or emails from anyone at the lab and/or the OIPC.”

The Wilsons have been receiving the faxes, which include booking information for mammographies and other medical scans, for about a dozen years.

Some West Coast Medical Imaging letterhead misprinted a digit of its Richmond Road location’s fax number, mistakenly giving the Wilsons’ number instead. The couple have tried repeatedly to get the situation rectified, without success.

kdedyna@timescolonist.com