You Need To Ask Him To Ask You If It’s Okay To Ask Him To Ask You

(I receive a call from a surgery about an insurance claim where we have emailed the client for more medical information. On the original report, the surgery has mentioned other conditions which would support his claim, but they have not given all the dates we need.)

Caller: “Yes, I’m calling in relation to [case]. [Customer] has emailed us the email you sent him, and we are going to need his consent to send that information to you.”

(I pull up the case and see that we have emailed a few questions to the customer asking him to get the GP to answer, and then send it back to him so he can send it to us. This might seem like a long way around but Data Protection Laws mean we have to do this.)

Me: “I can see we asked Mr. [Customer] to get some further information. Please provide that to the customer, and then they can send it to us if they wish to continue with the claim.”

Caller: “No, due to Data Protection we can’t, not without his permission.”

Me: “You can’t provide the customer with his information?”

Caller: “No.”

Me: “But by him asking you for that information, he has asked you to provide it to him. That is permission.”

Caller: “Well, we can’t. He has to give his permission.”

(This went on for quite a while with me hopelessly trying to point out by sending the email, the customer had, in fact, asked for this info to be sent. They could send it to him and this wouldn’t breach the Data Protection Act, since he can — you know — KNOW about himself. Eventually, I had to send an agreement to the customer to sign so they would release the information which has delayed the claim by almost two months. And I thought the admin at my surgery were incompetent!)