Health Ministry criticized for planning controversial database
For years now many Czech doctors have been collecting sensitive information about their patients. They say that detailed questionnaires on ethnicity, sexual orientation and lifestyle help them provide better care. Now the Health Ministry wants to take this practice further by setting up a central register of patients which would include such sensitive information in conjunction with an identification number, with the help of which any person can easily be traced.
The ministry's plan to "institutionalize" a practice which has long been controversial has shocked both patients and human rights activists. Sensitive information which was once known only to one's physician and found only on one hand-written file in his office would now be in a central register -accessible to thousands of people. Critics say the risk of abuse is enormous and the Office for Protection of Private Data says the state has no right to collect such information on citizens in the first place, much less to put it in a central register along with the patient's ID number. The case has also been taken up by the government's commissioner for human rights Jan Jarab:
"I think that we have to look for a balance between the rights of the individual and the protection of society and that any intrusion upon the rights of the individual must be justified and it must be protected from possible abuse. Unfortunately the proposal of the health ministry does not take individual rights into account at all. It looks for data which are not otherwise present anywhere in a non-anonymous form, such as ethnicity -which exists in the national census but in an anonymous form - and even data about sexual orientation which are not otherwise collected at all. It is obvious that this is a way of collecting data without the patient's consent and without even thinking about the patient's consent. Should there be a justification for such data to be collected at all -and I am very, very doubtful about that then it would have to be done through a law and that law would have to be subjected to debate in Parliament and, at the same time, to a public debate on how far do we need to go."
Can you tell me how far this has gone and what can be done to effectively stop it?
"I am not sure how much has already been collected without any kind of regulation but the creation of central registers containing such information must be prevented -and I am sure will be prevented- because it simply violates the law on data protection and in my opinion it also violates the Charter of fundamental rights and freedoms."
If the health ministry insists on a central database it will be up to Parliament to pass an appropriate law and set restrictions on what is and what is not permissible. However, the fate of existing data on computer and handwritten files across the country remains uncertain.
