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A woman in Moose Jaw was fired by the Saskatchewan Health Authority last year, after snooping on nearly 100 people’s medical files over less than a year.
According to a new report from the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the woman had been a unit clerk in the emergency department at the Dr. F.H. Wigmore Regional Hospital since 2016.
An audit by the health authority after the fact, found she had been snooping from July 2024 to June 2025. However, it was only discovered when a co-worker complained after the snooper came up and asked about a recent hospital stay regarding the co-worker’s pregnancy, which wasn’t open knowledge.
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The worker had been snooping in the Sunrise Clinical Manager database, which she had access to for her work.
In the privacy commissioner’s report, she relayed the health authority’s findings that there were 102 inappropriate accesses of information by the woman for 98 different people, as well as herself.
Employees working in Saskatchewan’s health system are not allowed to access their personal health information without the same “need to know” conditions applied to other information accesses.
She later admitted she shouldn’t have looked at her own results, saying she just wanted to know what was wrong with her and go home.
When the snooper was interviewed about the accesses, at first, the health authority said she mostly said told them didn’t remember. But in her submission to the privacy commissioner, she acknowledged what she did.
“I was totally in the wrong for checking my co-worker’s record but I did it out of compassion as I genuinely care about my co-workers,” she wrote.
She went on to say that she should have kept her mouth shut and didn’t mean to upset the co-worker, that she was sorry for her actions and didn’t mean to cause the co-worker grief.
The worker also snooped on a family member she didn’t have contact with and relayed information about their hospital visit to another family member. She said she shouldn’t have done it and knew it was wrong, but explained that she cared about that family member and what happens to them.
She also checked a number of patients’ files after they had been discharged from the hospital.
The snooper had gone through two rounds of privacy training with the health authority and signed a pledge to keep people’s privacy.
“In their submission to this office, the Snooper confirmed that in spite of the privacy training and the warranties they gave in the Pledge during their employment with SHA, they did not understand the ‘need to know’ principle and they never sought clarification,” noted privacy commissioner, Grace Hession David, in her report.
The health authority did inform all the affected people by mail, and a hand-delivered letter for the co-worker, but David said none of the affected people had made a complaint with her office.
In this case, the commissioner only laid out two recommendations for the health authority.
She said the SHA needs to suspend access accounts immediately for SHA workers who are suspected of inappropriately accessing information. It took a number of weeks for this snooper’s access to be revoked.
And she also recommended the SHA implement proactive monitoring and auditing of the database in Moose Jaw to make sure employees are complying with the privacy and security policies. As of the writing of the report, the health authority wasn’t proactively auditing the database.
