NHS Central London Data Breach (2011)

They include a major incident in 2011 in which a laptop containing details of 8.3 million patients was stolen from an unlocked store room at the headquarters of NHS Central London strategic health authority. A report on on the breach reveals that there was enough detail in the records to identify individual patients. Officials broke basic NHS security measures by using a laptop which was not encrypted, making it easy for strangers to access the data, which had been deleted but could be easily recovered. It states: The information downloaded to the laptop was disclosive data; the data downloaded (full postcode, age on admission, sex and ethnicity) could be used to identify an individual either directly or by linking to other publically available data.