District nurses must guard against inappropriately accessing patient records

Two NHS workers were recently disciplined after inappropriately accessing the records of the singer Ed Sheeran who had required treatment for a fractured wrist and elbow after falling from his bicycle ( Embury-Dennis 2018 ). The increasingly common use of electronic records across the NHS now allows nurses, including district nurses, to access a large archive of patient information that was much more difficult to obtain when records were manually held paper records. There have been several instances where curiosity and, occasionally, more malicious reasons have led district nurses and others to access those records and read the notes of high profile patients or persons known to them. In this article Richard Griffith cautions that district nurses who access and read the record of a person who is not in their care is in breach of both their duty of confidence and the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation 2016/679 EU ).