Getting info from Nunavut's health department a challenge, says privacy commissioner

Nunavut's own privacy commissioner says she faced challenges getting information from the territory's Department of Health for an upcoming audit of Iqaluit's hospital.

Elaine Keenan Bengts, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Nunavut, is set to release a privacy audit of Qikiqtani General Hospital. Her office started collecting documents about policies around privacy and access issues at the hospital last fall, and in June she spent four days in Iqaluit meeting with hospital staff and health officials.

"We found that the staff and management at the hospital were very open and went out of their way to get us what we needed," Keenan Bengts told a standing committee at Nunavut's legislature on Tuesday.

"The Department of Health was a little less inviting, shall we say, or interested in having us there. There was more reluctance. It took more digging to get what we needed from them."

Qikiqtani General Hospital is run by Nunavut's health department, not a hospital board like in many other jurisdictions.

Keenan Bengts said the standing committee encouraged her to do a formal privacy audit this year and she chose the hospital because it's a "large public body which collects large quantities of the most sensitive personal information about Nunavummiut."

Health official 'couldn't or wouldn't meet with us'

Keenan Bengts also had issues getting a meeting with an assistant deputy minister of health.

"When we were here in June, and at the hospital, she couldn't or wouldn't meet with us then — I don't know which," said Keenan Bengts.

"But we got to meet with virtually everyone in the hospital."

Keenan Bengts told CBC she understands people travel a lot in the summer, "but it did take us a long time to finally speak with her." Her interview with the assistant deputy minister took place two weeks ago.

Keenan Bengts also said the health department did not hand over all the documents needed for the audit.

"We discovered not through the department, but through another source that there was a set of privacy directives that had been drafted some years ago," she said.

"But nobody at the hospital knew about them and we didn't get them from the Department of Health, who should have provided them when we asked for all privacy policies in place.

"We got all the information we needed in the end, but some of it came in a roundabout way."

This is Keenan Bengts' first privacy audit in her 20-year career as Information and Privacy Commissioner of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. It should be released in the coming weeks.