– I am worried about what might happen. I believe that privacy is best safeguarded when the person responsible for guiding the professional environment and the management and controlling privacy is close to the hospital operation and professional environments, says head of research and professor Kristine Kleivi Sahlberg. Sahlberg is responsible for research and innovation in Vestre Viken, one of the largest health enterprises in South East Health, and consists of a number of hospitals. Until now, Vestre Viken, in line with the other healthcare institutions, has had its own data protection representatives. This is also the practice at the other large regional health undertakings in the country, Helse Nord, Helse Midt-Norway and Helse West. Each hospital has its own data protection officer. These privacy representatives are both advisers to the professional environment and management as well as representatives for the patients. These are the ombudsmen you, as a patient, can contact if you fear for your own privacy. Privacy representative at head office The directors of Helse Sør Øst will remove the 11–12 local privacy representatives and replace them with a central representative who will sit at the head office in Oslo together with the directors and staff. news has had conversations with a number of employees and managers in Helse Sør Øst who are critical of such a development. The country’s largest healthcare company has as many as 3.2 million patients and 81,000 employees. – The data protection ombudsman’s advice and expertise is extremely important to include early in planning when looking at new processes that are to be digitized in order to protect privacy, information security and to succeed in a good way, says Kristine Kleivi Sahlberg. She says that the professional communities and researchers in Vestre Viken are also skeptical about moving the data protection officers away from the hospitals and centralizing it to the head office of Health South-East. – I fear that we will get privacy representatives who sit further away from professional environments and patient care and that could lead to privacy getting worse instead of better, says Kristine Kleivi Sahlberg. FROM MANY TO ONE: The top management in Helse Sør Øst will no longer have many local data protection representatives. Instead, they want a central data protection representative. Digitization at a high pace This is happening at a time when Helse Sør Øst is in a demanding situation with large digitization projects at the same time as the hospitals have to cut costs. Earlier this week, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority sounded a warning about IT security in hospitals. There is a greater need than ever for more data protection officers who are “hands on,” says Joachim Thode, chief shop steward for the Academics. – I think it is the wrong time to do this. We will digitise, we will modernize IT systems and infrastructure. And just then it is even more important to have good personal protection. good impact assessment and a good data protection officer who can help us make the right choices and give the right advice, says Thode. TAUSE: CEO Terje Rootwelt in Helse Sør Øst and the rest of the top management will not comment on the centralization for the time being, but confirm that the plan will be discussed in a board meeting later this spring. Photo: Ola Bjørlo Strande / news Want to centralize The management of Health Sør Øst will not be interviewed, but confirms in an e-mail that they are working to centralize the ombudsmen into a data protection ombudsman. Communications advisor Knut Albert Solem writes: – Organization of the data protection ombudsman role was dealt with in the director’s meeting on 2 March, and Helse Sør-East RHF received approval to proceed with the assessments of establishing a joint data protection ombudsman for the enterprise group. During the discussion, input was received from the health organizations which will be taken into account in the further proceedings. The matter will be presented to the group shop stewards and then again to the management team in Helse Sør-East RHF. After that, it is planned to be considered by the board in Helse Sør-East RHF, tentatively in April. This afternoon, a message went out to managers in Helse Sør Øst that the top management of the regional health company at a director’s meeting last week agreed to centralize the data protection representatives. The plan is probably to have several advisers around the one representative. – This is not the right way to go. I fear that the privacy ombudsman’s function will be used less, and it will be a longer way to contact the ombudsman for both employees and managers. I am afraid that a central data protection officer may be perceived as being a tool of top management. And that will weaken the data protection commissioner, says Joachim Thode. – It is positive that the management wants to strengthen privacy, but I do not think that this is the right way to strengthen it, says Kristine Kleivi Sahlberg.
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The country’s largest healthcare company will cut data protection officers – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country
