by Rachel Hovenden

rhovenden@thekmgroup.co.uk

A hospital has been criticised after it accidentally destroyed 10,000 archived records.

The Darent Valley Hospital documents, which should have been kept in a dedicated storage area, were put in a disposal room due to lack of space.

They were then mistakenly taken and destroyed sometime between December 28 and 31 last year.

Staff at the hospital in Darenth Wood Road, Dartford, didn't know that the information was missing until March 2011.

Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, has not been able to establish how many of the records contained personal information.

Some records included the names and addresses of former patients and some staff, and a limited amount of medical information relating to the patients' previous treatment.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said that the hospital had breached the Data Protection Act and ordered that the trust take action to ensure its staff are aware of data protection policies and procedures and that they receive training on how to follow them.

The trust will also monitor its staff to make sure policies are correctly followed.

Sally Anne Poole, acting head of enforcement, said: "Although the majority of information lost was several years old, and only being kept for archiving purposes, there is no excuse for failing to keep it secure.

"The hospital should have ensured that the records were kept in a safe area and, had they had adequate audit trails in place, they would have been able to keep track of where this information was at all times."

The trust has confirmed that the loss of these records does not pose a clinical risk to people whose details were among them.

A hospital spokesman said: "We fully accept the findings and judgement from the Information Commissioners' Office (ICO) relating to the loss of records identified in March 2011.

"We investigated the incident at the time, and formally reported it to the ICO. "We have strengthened our information governance processes following the outcome of our investigations.

"The implementation of the Information Commissioner's recommendations is under way, and will be monitored by the Trust's Information Governance Committee.

"It is regrettable that on this occasion the correct procedure was not followed, and we would like to reassure patients that the information would have been disposed of as part of the trust's confidential waste process.

"The ICO has accepted our findings and our assurance that the loss of the records does not pose any risk to patients."