Interior Health says there is no concern for patient information as it investigates information breaches involving the personal information of about 500 current and former employees.
“We are extremely concerned about this situation,” says Mal Griffin, Vice President for Human Resources. “The reason we’ve gone public now with this is because we want all of our staff to know that we’re doing everything possible to get to the bottom of it, to ensure that we don’t have anything like this occur again.”
The information was found in the possession of two separate individuals arrested by Lower Mainland RCMP on two separate occasions in the last three months.
“It was back in June we were notified by the Lower Mainland RCMP they had arrested an individual who had in their possession records of personal information of approximately 300 individuals, and it was discovered that the majority of those individuals were either current or former employees of Interior Health,” explains Griffin. “At that point, we responded with an investigation and a follow-up response plan where we contacted all of the employees to let them know about the incident and to offer them credit protection for a period of 12 months. We completed our investigation and we had reported the incident to the office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner immediately after we were contacted by the RCMP.”
Griffin adds the Commissioner had completed their review of their response and closed the case in August indicating that they felt Interior Health did everything they had needed in response to the incident.
“Unfortunately last week we were again contacted by the RCMP in the Lower Mainland that they found another individual who had in their possession a list of personal information of approximately 200 people; again majority of current or former employees of Interior Health.”
Preliminary investigation according to Griffin found similarities between the two sets of information and Interior Health felt it was quite possible that the two incidents are linked.
“As a result, we embarked on a more wholesome investigation and have now hired a third party expert and privacy and security firm to see if they can find anything that perhaps we didn’t find in our investigation and provide with some advice with what to do next.”
Griffin says it is unclear how the information was obtained and that Interior Health continues to assist RCMP to the fullest extent possible.
“Unfortunately identity theft seems to be on the rise across the world and particularly in North America so it’s becoming all too common. This is the first incident of this type for Interior Health….We really sympathize with individuals because it is very unsettling to know that somebody could have access to their personal information and use it for fraudulent purposes.”