http://rhizomedigital.com.au/privacy-access-and-client-records/
Recently I have had considerable exposure to the intricacies and complexity of client records, especially in Community Service Organisations or CSOs. I have worked closely with CSOs for a number of years now and with each interaction I learn some new detail of the complexity involved in creating, keeping and maintaining these records. One of the biggest issues is disposal, but that is a story for another time!
Whilst working for CSOs I have come across various issues related to privacy and access to client records.
The first issue I identified is in the creation and ongoing management of client records. Some CSOs have multiple programs each with different levels of client interaction and obligation on client recordkeeping. For instance, obligations for creation and retention of records for client who seek financial counselling are different to records created by a social worker in family counselling. Those CSOs who provide family day care services or supervised care for infants so that parents can learn English and so on have different obligations than the records created under a federally funded youth employment scheme.
Yikes! What a mess!
I have spoken to lots of people who work directly with clients in CSOs (family counsellors, social workers and so on) and are responsible for creating the records. I have found there is significant confusion and frustration, as you would imagine. Often Government contracts do not clearly indicate what records need to be created and kept. And social workers who might be using industry standard frameworks for what kind of information to put into a client file are potentially not fulfilling organisational need for records formats or information retention.
What this leads to for client records is the potential for information to be stored in different places (computer, network, paper files, Government database and so on). This causes a variety of problems related to access – where can you find all the right information if it is stored everywhere?
The ten National Privacy Principles (which you can find on the Office of the Information Commissioner’s website) regulate how information can be collected, used and shared. I won’t go through each one individually here, but consider what the implications for a client might be if information cannot be readily accessed? What if the information captured was available to anyone who came into the organisation and sat down at the computer? What might be the consequence if someone finds records on a client that are out of date, but there was no indication or information that showed that they were? In a mental health situation this might prove very problematic for the client and the person responsible for the client’s welfare at the CSO.
Now consider this situation. Imagine you are a client – or ex-client and you want to see your record sometime after you were a client of a CSO. This situation is not unusual. There are significant projects going on in Australia right now that address the impact of particular public policies by Government. Remember the apology to the Stolen Generations? The Forgotten Australians? Forced adoption practices? Many of the records about these people are held in CSOs who undertook Government services.
If recordkeeping practices were not rigorous, or records were not retained then people affected by these policies cannot get access to them. The Find & Connect project helps children who were previous in care to find their records in CSOs, but this does not mean they are there, or they are complete.
Last year I worked with Anglicare Victoria on a project to index photographs, slides and negatives of care leavers dating back to the 1920s. We indexed over 8000 images as part of the project. Why? Because people find connections with self, memory, family and identity through photographs.
Sometimes client records are used to conduct investigations, such as the upcoming Royal Commission into institutionalised child abuse and the current Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into child abuse. Records are then used to identify and redress injustice.
I have heard that in Canada there is legislation that says that poor recordkeeping practices is not an excuse for poor, incomplete and missing records. I wish it were like that here.
Issues around privacy and access do not end here. Consider someone who wants to get in contact with missing relatives such as the falsely labelled orphaned child migrants? Privacy legislation does not cover this kind of access. Why not? Because privacy is about the individual – or at least that is how our legal system has constructed it. But what about privacy of the collective?
There are many complexities in recordkeeping, particularly for CSOs. This is just a little bit of info about how complex it can be. I did a review of legislation earlier this year on the different types of client records a CSO might create, particularly if they dealt with adoption and out-of-home care records. What a mammoth task that was! But it really helped me understand the different layers – what the law wants, what CSOs want, what community wants, what care leavers want and so on.
Recordkeeping really is a mix of obligations. It is difficult to see them, let alone juggle them all.
Comments
Thanks Frank for your response and for sharing your story. A big issue I have heard about is the way that those who work with care leaver records (esp. Govt. institutions) are excessively risk adverse in relation to privacy and redaction plus time poor so that appropriate prior research on publicly accessible information is not conducted. This also contributes to poor communications and sensitivity with care leavers when releasing records. With the possibility of future apologies for activities occurring now (think detention of asylum seekers) plus general re-thinking about access, this situation needs to be addressed urgently.
I have been thinking recently about how Centrelink now client identifiers appear to be family oriented (we all have the same number, but different letter). What might that mean for family records?
Nice article Leisa, thank you. Very gentle manner in pointing out some of the problems. I would add some elements to what you call the "complexities".
One of the main problems for former wards of state and others who grew up in institutions ( I strongly dislike being labelled by the term "Forgotten Australians") is that the records are hardly ever to be found in one place. A great number of us were placed in more than one institution. Many (most) of these institutions have closed. So not only do you have to find out who took over the records, but you have to do so for each of the different agencies.
Next there is the problem of censorship and worse. We know that some records have been "disappeared" because of what they contain in the context of seeking redress. We know that whistleblowers get moved on or worse. We know that gatekeepers often have a knee-jerk reaction to third-party mentions. In Victoria, for example, they all seem to know about section 33(1) of the FOI Act and the white-out fluid flows freely; but no-one seems to get Section 33(3) of the same Act which allows for third-party information to be released under certain circumstances. For example, I waited 15 years to get a copy of my mother's only letter to the Welfare. DHS wouldn't let me see a central paragraph of this precious hand-written letter because it mentioned someone else. When I finally got to see it after years of persistent requests, the result was bizarre, The censored passage mentioned my brother and the particular issue raised was something I knew already - and had written about in a public forum. How dumb is that? Why keep these personal records from all those years ago (in that case the early 1950s) if the people who are the subject of them are not allowed to see them?
Many children who went in to institutions as siblings. Many of us were separated. Some were lucky enough to be kept together. Most of us had personal files, but in some cases, the authorities placed a letter or file note in only one sibling's dossier. On appeal I was given many pages from one of my brothers' dossiers because the notes affected me too.
Ultimately, we went in to the welfare system as a family and our records should be regarded as family records, surely? I have since found that more than 30 relatives over the years (starting in 1865) were in institutions in Victoria. Now I want to put the pieces of this complex story together as a coherent whole. It's my way of understanding the welfare system which I was a small part of. I have been blocked repeatedly with the parrot screech "No, because of the Privacy Act (sic)". Mostly when I ask what section of the so-called "Privacy Act" they are referring to I am fobbed off.
All of this sounds complicated. But it doesn't have to be. Those of us who grew up without our families want to know the answers to some simple questions. Why were we put in "care"? Who looked after us, and how? What were we like as we grew up? What happened to my family while I was inside? What changed to allow us to leave? Where can I read all about it?