Doctors' website breach probed

The Department of Health has launched an investigation after a security lapse in the Government's controversial application website for junior doctors revealed highly personal details.

The Department of Health said in a statement on Wednesday night: "We apologise to any applicants whose details have been improperly accessed. This is a very serious matter and is under investigation.

"This URL was made available to a strictly-limited number of people making checks as part of the employment process. This information was never publicly available through the NHS Medical Training Application Service website and was only accessible for only a short period of time after details of the URL were leaked. The MTAS team fixed the problem as soon as it was brought to their attention."

The breach allowed access to confidential information including doctors' addresses and telephone numbers, previous convictions, sexual orientation and religion, Channel 4 News said.

The programme said that since at least 9am on Wednesday, the details of medical students applying for foundation course posts to become a junior doctor were openly available to the public.

Channel 4 News said it was told about the security breach by a doctor and informed the Department of Health at 4.35pm. The breach was closed at 5.05pm.

Jo Hilborne, of the Junior Doctor Committee for the British Medical Association, told the programme: "I know that as soon as you demonstrated to me that there was a problem I made a few calls and brought it to the attention of the people I know in the Department of Health.

"I am very pleased they have taken it down straight away. I think that's entirely the right thing to do. It doesn't address the issue of how it got there in the first place and that still needs a very serious inquiry, a proper in-depth look into how this possibly could have happened, particularly when we have known for such a long time that there are concerns about this website.

"It hasn't been a secret that juniors' faith in this whole system has been very, very badly damaged and this isn't going to help at all."

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley told Channel 4 News he had a letter from the British Orthopaedic Trainees Association to Ms Hewitt dated March 5 which highlighted risks to security on the site. He called for an urgent investigation by the information commissioner and added: "There should be redress against anybody who is responsible for such a serious breach of people's data confidentiality."

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