£10,000 settlement for data breach involving mental health information

The leading team at Your Lawyers – the Data Leak Lawyers – was able to settle a privacy compensation matter in the sum of £10,000 that involved the disclosure of mental health information.

The disclosure arose from an entirely avoidable error that had a significant impact on our client, as we will outline below.

Simple error leads to £10,000 data breach claim settlement

Sometimes, such simple errors can result in a substantial impact on the victim of a data breach. In one such case we previously settled damages for in the sum of £10,000, our client was the victim of a very simple but incredibly unfortunate and significant error. In this particular case, all it took was for a healthcare professional to inadvertently send mental health information to the wrong person as a result of mixing up patient names. Whilst it can be easy on the one hand to suggest that you can see how such a thing could happen, it is simply not good enough that it did happen.

The result of this incident was that our client’s mental health information was disclosed to somebody else. As you can imagine, our client was already suffering as a result of mental health matters, so the breach caused significant added stress, worry, and anxiety that they could have done without.

The importance of protecting mental health information

We have already touched on this above about how someone suffering from mental health problems could be significantly impacted in a worse way when mental health information is exposed or misused. Essentially, anyone in this position is already a vulnerable person who could be susceptible to a greater impact from added pressure. Problems could be compounded and made worse as a result of an avoidable data breach incident that can have a substantial impact on their already fragile state.

Medical data is already afforded additional protection in accordance with the GDPR as ‘special category’ information. The purpose of this is to recognise that the exposure of such information could have a greater impact on the victim. It is, therefore, incredibly important that healthcare workers do all they can to make sure that they protect the mental health data that they are responsible for storing and processing. There should always be a mindset about the impact and what could happen if such information was misused or exposed, so that the protection of such data can be taken seriously.

In some of the worst-case scenarios, any data breach involving information such as this could have such a substantial impact on the victim.

Access to justice – data breach compensation

At Your Lawyers – The Data Leak Lawyers – our leading privacy team has been fighting for justice on behalf of people affected by data breaches, leaks and hacks for almost a decade. We are committed in our efforts to access to justice, which is why we are proud to be able to help people in any way that we can, and provide No Win, No Fee legal representation.

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