Shock horror, down the country people know your business

Our correspondent in the valley of the squinting windows has discovered shocking evidence of confidential medical information being available to any nosey-parker that cares to have a root through the odd filing cabinet . According to a Drogheda Independent exclusive, a confidentiality scandal has erupted at that monument to modern medical practice better known as Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital.

While making a routine trip to the hospital to stroke some votes out of the sick and dying, Labour councillor Gerald Nash was mortified to discover that there was open, unsupervised access to patient files in the visiting room. The clearly perturbed politico described his distress at the discovery:

I could clearly see highly confidential patient files and I could clearly make out who they belonged to. If I was so minded, I could have decided to have a trawl through these files in an unsupervised room....Worryingly for patients and medical staff alike, there is a high risk that confidential patient files could be removed or stolen thereby resulting in the loss of a lifetime’s worth of medical history

Not being so minded our Gerry refrained from having a quick perusal of his rivals' medical data (yeah, right!) and instead absconded from the building clutching a batch of appointment forms for endoscopies, blood tests, x-rays and a range of other such services.

Queues are already forming outside the crusading councillor's constituency office following his announcement that

I can also write you a sick note for a couple of weeks or send you for physiotherapy.

Cllr Nash is expected to hold his seat comfortably at the forthcoming elections and stay well within his election campaign budget.

A unnamed spokesperson for the hospital said that the board of management was deeply concerned that the important ability to lose patients' files was no longer in the control of medical and administrative staff and said this would have important implications for the massaging of waiting lists.

In a brief statement given before waddling swiftly away from reporters , Minister of Health, Mary Harney said 'Not that fucking kip of a place again. The sooner we replace it with a state of the art private healthcare centre.....'