Settlement reached in decade-old lawsuit connected to Western Health privacy breach

An out-of-court settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit involving Western Health that dates back more than a decade.

The lawsuit was launched in August 2012, alleging that the health authority failed to protect the personal information of patients and violated the province's Privacy Act.

The class-action said more than 1,000 people were harmed when a Western Health employee accessed private medical files, including personal information. The employee has since been dismissed.

Bob Buckingham, one of the lawyers on the case, said it's believed to be the first settlement connected to a health-care privacy breach in Newfoundland and Labrador.

About 100 of those people have died since the class-action was filed, according to Buckingham, who said it's upsetting those people won't be able to see a resolution or get answers as to why their information was accessed.

"The people have gone through years and years of not knowing why their information was accessed," he told CBC News on Monday.

"The stress and strain on people has just been tremendous. In particular, the strain on the two lead plaintiffs who were with us all the way. This has been on their mind every day for the past 10 years."

Buckingham wouldn't comment on the amount of the settlement, as it is yet to be approved by a judge, but called the number satisfactory.

Buckingham said much of the lawsuit involved fighting for recognition of intrusion on seclusion, a legal tort centred around privacy not often dealt with in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Intrusion on seclusion can be claimed if the defendant intentionally intruded on a patient's privacy, the intrusion is highly offensive to the average person, and the intrusion caused the plaintiff significant anguish or suffering.

"All of those issues were before the court," he said.

"The legal issues, some of them are novel in the sense that they hadn't been litigated in Newfoundland before around this privacy issue. So both parties were presenting to the court novel arguments, novel law, novel facts. And I think it was just decided that it would be better to negotiate a resolution."

The two-week trial was set to begin on Monday, but was expected to happen last year, said Buckingham. He said it was delayed by the cyberattack that debilitated the province's health-care system in October 2021.

He believes the attack could have played a factor in the health authority's preparedness to fight the lawsuit in court, but hopes it and the class-action will prompt officials to take privacy seriously.