Don’t shoot doctors over password-sharing, says clinical lead

Peter Curry, clinical lead of eHealth at NHS Fife, has warned that password-sharing on some systems is the norm and that "shooting doctors" for doing so could be counter-productive - because the new technology will not be used.

He was responding to a Computer Weekly blog article about the sharing of passwords on a hospital Pacs x-ray system.

The article said that the sharing of passwords at a hospital in Devon had made it difficult to identify which doctor wrongly verified the treatment of a patient who died after a blunder.

Curry said that money spent on security for systems being delivered under the NHS's National Programme for IT should have been invested in a "proper, workable staff authentication solution together with a proper robust role-based access control model".

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