According to the complaint, the nurse, who was recovering from a psychological leave, detected that, when she spoke with workers at the center to manage aspects of her temporary disability situation, some employees “mentioned specific episodes” of her life “of which they should have no knowledge”. Faced with this suspicion, on October 5, 2023, he submitted a request for access to the hospital’s public information to find out which workers had accessed his medical history in the last year and a half. The answer was a document that recorded 21 accesses by seven different people, which appear in the form of codes.
Crime of disclosure of secrets
“They have accessed her clinical history when she has not been assisted in this hospital and there is only an employment relationship. The facts have no apparent justification, affect the most private and personal sphere and directly violate her fundamental right to privacy,” the complaint states. In addition, it is proposed that these facts may constitute a crime of disclosure of secrets by a public official. For this reason, they are calling for an investigation into who is behind the access codes for each record.
The complaint was presented to the Berga security courts last January 23, and two weeks later, in a short resolution, the judge dismissed it saying that “access to the data is not criminal conduct”. The complainant’s defense, represented by lawyer Valentina Mazzoni and lawyer Carlos Lopez Graell of the criminal law firm Requena & Mazzoni Advocats, filed an appeal against this decision on February 22. Finally, the judge ruled this week that there is a risk that the complainant will not have “effective judicial protection” and has ordered the case to be reopened. At the same time, he has asked that the investigation begin with the complainant’s statement and that she herself hand over the documents that attest to the access to her profile.
In the appeal to have the case reopened, his defense provided Supreme Court jurisprudence in similar cases, such as a March 2021 ruling that convicts a nurse who accessed a colleague’s data “out of curiosity”. “Health is part of the strict privacy of the person and is inherent in the scope of the strictest privacy,” concludes the sentence. This is confirmed by lawyer Carlos Sánchez Almeida, an expert in data protection, who states that medical data enjoys “special protection” also under European legislation.
Dismissal
In the complaint, the nurse explains that she started working as a nurse at the Berga hospital in March 2019 and that in October of the same year they decided not to renew her contract. She was pregnant at the time and decided to follow up at another hospital. She also took the dismissal to court, which ruled in her favor, so in March 2022 they had to readmit her. But then she was pregnant again, and during the management of the nursing leave with the hospital was when she began to notice that, according to her complaint, the workers knew private information about her. This situation brought him psychological consequences and he is currently still on sick leave.
Recently the Berga hospital has also been in the spotlight for being one of the centers where the fake doctor worked, who was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison after admitting that she practiced without a qualification, although he does not have to serve the sentence if he does not reoffend.
