A child’s counselling file has been missing from an NWT health authority office for years after a departing counsellor tried to hand over paper records of their cases.
A report by the NWT’s privacy commissioner outlines a series of searches by staff that somehow kept turning up mislaid files every time, but never the file they were trying to find.
The report reveals sensitive counselling records were being kept in cloth reusable grocery bags – and even in a laptop bag “underneath a pile of personal items.”
The community in question isn’t revealed in the report. The health authority has said staff must now use locked boxes to transport files, rather than grocery bags, and a policy governing how clients’ information is moved is being finalized.
Privacy commissioner Andrew Fox’s report was filed in February this year and published online last week. It deals with a child and youth counselling file that was first declared missing on November 2, 2021.
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Such files normally contain a person’s name, birth date, counselling session notes and other sensitive information, although Fox said the NWT’s health authority doesn’t know for sure what was in this one. Staff reportedly said the file held more than five years of information and was “noticeably larger than the other files in the set.”
When a counsellor working with the child left their position in July 2021, they brought all their files to the office of the community’s mental health and addictions counsellor in two cloth grocery bags, both placed inside a bigger plastic bag. Later, in October that year once a new child and youth counsellor had started, the mental health and addictions counsellor took the bags to the new employee at the school.
Nobody ever made a list of which people’s files were inside the
