DPC probes claims of employers getting workers' Covid-19 results first

The Data Protection Commission is investigating a number of “queries and complaints” about incidents where employees who were tested for Covid-19 in their workplace were told of their results after their employers.
DPC probes claims of employers getting workers' Covid-19 results first

File photo of Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner.
File photo of Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner.

The Data Protection Commission is investigating a number of “queries and complaints” about incidents where employees in sectors including nursing homes and meat processing plants who were tested for Covid-19 in their workplace only to be told of their results after their employers.

Both long-term residential care settings and latterly meat plants have seen significant numbers of clusters of the illness, prompting health authorities to conduct widespread testing in both settings in an effort to isolate those infected.

Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner with the DPC, said it is unclear what the process is for such workplace testing, and as to who the obligation to test falls upon or if it is mandatory by law, and added that it is “important these issues are clarified and rectified” in order to maintain public trust.

“The administration of the... test would appear to involve the processing of both personal data and special category personal data for the purposes of the GDPR and the individual retains rights in respect of their personal data,” Mr Doyle said.

“From this remove, the DPC cannot see how it can be legitimised that medical test results of this nature would not be communicated in the first instance directly to each individual staff member whether by sms text or phone call,” he added.

It’s unclear how many complaints have been received, nor precisely what the nature of the situations are which saw the employers receiving knowledge of positive test results before their employees.

At yesterday’s full-day first meeting of the Oireachtas’ special committee on Covid-19, the Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan said that any such incident is “a breach of confidentiality, full stop”.

However, later in the same afternoon the CEO of the HSE Paul Reid said he was only aware of one such incident of an employer hearing about their workers’ positive results in advance, and said the decision to communicate that information in that manner was made "on public health grounds” given the scale of the outbreak at that site.

It is not the first such incident where people undergoing tests hear about their results from somebody else - an administrative issue continues to dog the testing process which sees a lack of a phone number for a person see their positive test results communicated to them in the first instance by their own GP.

There were 458 clusters (two or more cases in the once place) of Covid-19 in nursing homes and long term residential care institutions as of May 16. Meanwhile, 15 clusters, involving nearly 700 cases of the disease, have been discovered at meat processing plants to date.

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