The
Scottish Ambulance Service has
lost a disk containing the details of around 900,000 emergency
calls made to the service.
The lost information includes addresses of incidents, phone
numbers and patient names, confirmed the service.
It said, "The package containing contact information from our
Paisley Emergency Medical Dispatch Centre (EMDC) has gone missing
in transit with a courier to one of our specialist IT
suppliers.
"The portable data disc contained a copy of the record of calls
to the Ambulance Service in the West of Scotland since February
2006."
The service said all information was password-protected and was
also protected by "high security industry standard encryption".
In addition, to further protect the information, "all the data
was scrambled so that it should not be possible to match any of the
information against an individual", the service said.
The extensive protection of the data will be commended in some
quarters, but the
HMRC lost disks debacle saw the public sector being slammed for
sending disks by courier, instead of securely sending data
electronically.
The disk was on its way to IT systems firm MIS Emergency
Services in Manchester, but was reportedly lost by courier firm
TNT.
A helpline to re-assure past callers has been set up.