In News

Follow this topic

Bookmark

Record learning outcomes

A pharmacist who accessed a colleague’s private medical records and made comments that left the colleague feeling “humiliated” has been suspended for three months. 

Adnan Hassan was working as a rotation pharmacist in Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust in February 2022 when he accessed the records of a junior practitioner and spent 17 minutes viewing documents including GP letters and urological results, as evidenced by audit logs on medical records system Evolve. 

Mr Hassan went on to use specific terms from the medical records in conversation with the colleague, who is referred to in a recent GPhC fitness to practise report as Person A. Mr Hassan claimed he was researching “niche topics” for his new job. 

The conversation – which did not concern an area relevant to Mr Hassan’s professional duties – raised Person A’s suspicions that Mr Hassan had accessed his records, triggering an investigation. 

Person A told a disciplinary investigation meeting that he “felt personally attacked, humiliated, and vulnerable” and that the incident had caused him to seek out counselling. He also worried that the beach of sensitive information might affect how senior managers view him. 

Mr Hassan gave conflicting statements to his employers about his actions and the reasons for them, at first claiming in an informal conversation that the unauthorised access had been “accidental” and that he had exited the record immediately after realising it concerned Person A. 

In a subsequent investigatory meeting on March 11, 2022 he admitted accessing the medical record but claimed he had “only viewed the front page for about five minutes”. 

When confronted with the evidence from the audit logs, he admitted having accessed the documents but claimed he had skim-read them. 

However, in submissions to the FtP committee he admitted he had behaved recklessly and acknowledged previously providing false statements which he said had “diminished my credibility”. 

In written evidence, Mr Hassan said he had found Person A to be a “closed book” and had accessed the personal records in an attempt to improve their working relationship, a course of action he acknowledged was inappropriate.

The FtP committee rejected this explanation and said it had not been able to ascertain “why he would have wanted to do so or how any of the content of those records would have revealed any common ground between the two”. 

It found he had acted “dishonestly and without integrity” and had failed to maintain professional boundaries, concluding that he may also pose a risk to patients by accessing their sensitive medical records “without consent or clinical justification”. 

The FtP committee imposed a three-month suspension order and said his “shortcomings are capable of remediation with focused CPD and further development of his insight”.

Read more: GP pharmacist 'manipulated system' to prescribe tramadol for partner