Vaccination status of COVID-19 hospital patients (FOI)

Request 

Can you please provide the number of patients with Covid 19 in the Jersey General Hospital?

Please kindly provide the figures in the attached table (excel file). Please note that I only require a number of patients and not their names. The names constitute a part of of GDPR, however, the plain numbers not. Bearing this in mind I would expect your prompt feedback.

Response

The 'Vaccine status of COVID-19 patients in Jersey General Hospital' report was published on www.gov.je on 21 January 2022.

Vaccine status of COVID19 patients in Jersey General Hospital

As the information is in the public domain and accessible by other means, Article 23 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

Note:

The response template provided requested details of the number of patients with COVID-19 in Jersey General Hospital broken down by month, and then further broken down by whether they were 'fully vaccinated' or 'unvaccinated'. To provide data in this way, small numbers would have to be provided, and as such this could impact on the privacy of individuals. Therefore, Article 25 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 (personal information) has been applied.

The published report provides data between July and December 2021 only. As explained in the report, the vaccination status of patients is not held in recorded form. To compile the report, the data was extracted from various sources and manipulated. Aside from taking more than the prescribed 12.5 hours to do that work, the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Scheduled Public Authority to manipulate data in order to provide a response. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied, and no data relating to this matter, prior to July 2021 will be disclosed.

Articles applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Article 23 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.

Article 25  -  Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if – (a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018; and (b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

(3) In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.