An NHS manager has been suspended following the theft of a laptop containing the details of 21,000 patients from his car.

The details, stolen from the Colchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, include names, postcodes, dates of birth and medical information. They were password-protected but unencrypted.

CEO Peter Murphy said the trust’s patients should be reassured that “the trust takes security and patient confidentiality very seriously” but admitted that the laptop should have been encrypted.

“The trust offers all affected patients its sincere apologies for putting their confidential information at risk,” he said.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is investigating whether the latest incident breaches the Data Protection Act. The ICO has been cracking down on corporate and public sector data security following the widely publicised HMRC and MoD data losses.

Further reading

Government slammed by data breach reports

This data will self-destruct New anti-theft device wipes sensitive information

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