Balancing the right to data protection with managing the care of HIV patients

Résumé fourni par la source

The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS), has a legislative role in the surveillance, management, and research into HIV in South Africa. As part of this, it routinely collects, stores, uses, re-uses, and shares large quantities of health personal information. In 2019, with the coming into effect of the Protection of Personal Information (POPIA) 2013 anticipated, the NICD Paediatric HIV Surveillance Team undertook to establish whether its current management of individual personal information related to HIV surveillance was POPIA compliant. A legal opinion was commissioned to review the surveillance procedures, concerns were identified, and proposed changes to ensure NICD compliance with POPIA were made. This chapter will reflect on the NICD Paediatric HIV Surveillance Team’s challenges in complying with POPIA while meeting their HIV reporting objectives. It will explore how a public health institute has attempted to achieve a balance between protecting a patient’s rights to privacy and data protection on the one hand, and the public interest in ensuring individuals are provided with optimum care on the other.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.