The loss, thought to involve personal information on hundreds of thousands of people, emerged as part of a government-wide review following security breaches in other departments.

The Department of Health said the affected patients had been informed about the loss and there was no evidence the information had fallen into the wrong hands. It added investigations were under way and action would be taken against anyone who had failed to fulfil their responsibilities under data protection laws.

Andrew Lansley, shadow home secretary, said the latest loss underlined the Conservative party’s case against the government developing centralised databases. It also raised questions over how the planned electronic patients database in the NHS would protect sensitive medical records.

“For over two years we have argued for data to be held locally, with networking rather than one central database. The government should accept that this would offer us greater protection,” Mr Lansley said.

The NHS data loss comes after police admitted they had failed to discover the whereabouts of two computer discs lost last month in the post by Revenue & Customs. The discs contained the names, addresses, dates of birth and bank account details of every child benefit claimant, in the biggest recorded loss of data ever in Europe.

While law enforcement and the banking sector have in recent weeks developed a new coordinated system for checking on suspicious transactions, senior investigators say the failure to find the discs containing data on 25m people risks exposing large swathes of the population to possible fraud and identity theft in the future.

The latest loss also follows the more recent revelation, on Monday last week, that details of 3m learner drivers had been lost after being sent to a private contractor in Iowa in the US.

By yesterday afternoon the details of what data had been mislaid by the trusts had not been disclosed by the Department of Health. But according to a report in the Sunday Mirror, one of the breaches was thought to involve the loss of names and addresses of 160,000 children by City and Hackney Primary Care Trust after a disc containing data failed to arrive at a London hospital.

Patient Care, the patient support group, said ministers should not try to gloss over the latest “scandal” affecting the poor handling of data.

Joyce Robins of Patient Care told the BBC: “It’s the tip of the iceberg, actually, because there’s such carelessness within the NHS and it’s always impossible to hold anyone to account and find out who’s actually done anything. It may be only a matter of time before records fall into the wrong hands and we see not only our ex-directory phone numbers posted on the internet but the record of our abortions, HIV and Aids status.”

From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1e6bccd8-b1c3-11dc-9777-0000779fd2ac.html