A Stone community leader has raised concerns about patients giving out private information within earshot of others when booking in for appointments at their doctors' surgery.

Jill Hood told health bosses she could overhear patients giving sensitive details such as their date of birth and address to a receptionist at a GP surgery while she was escorting an elderly resident to an appointment.

She described it as a "gross breach of GDPR" (General Data Protection Regulation) when speaking to senior members of Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Integrated Care Board at a county council scrutiny committee meeting on Monday (January 26).

County councillors are now urging the ICB, which oversees local health services, to write to all GP surgeries to remind them of the need for privacy and GDPR compliance when patients have conversations with reception staff.

Councillor Hood said she reported her concerns to surgery staff during the visit. She told the committee: "I'm quite often at my doctors and other doctors because I take elderly people through a volunteer scheme.

"The reason was because their automatic booking in system was broken. Because there's this ludicrous loudspeaker inside the glass screen, everyone can clearly hear what is being asked and what is being replied.

"One of the young trainees said 'it's like that at Royal Stoke', as though that excused the fact that is taking place in the doctors' surgeries still. Over the years at committees I have raised it time and time again.

"This shouldn't be happening. But I must say at the doctors' surgeries I go to, the staff are charming and very professional."

Sarah Jeffery, Director of Primary Care at Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB, responded: "I would say to pick that up with the practice manager directly and raise your concerns.

"We don't see that with all GP practices, so I wonder if that's a consequence of leaving in windows and things that have been there since Covid.

"You're absolutely right. They should not be breaking confidentiality like that."

Stafford-based GP Dr Mark Stone, clinical lead for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB, said: "I agree they should be maintaining patient confidentiality and it's not acceptable from that point of view. There needs to be a way of looking at how that is changed.

"For our practice patients we try and maintain a reasonable distance away so those conversations can be done in private. We're lucky, we have a slightly quieter area that we can take patients over to.

"The difficulty in some practices is they have very tiny waiting rooms and it's difficult around the facilities they've got. But that doesn't excuse patient confidentiality.

"They may have given names and addresses and they may have talked about other conditions that may need to be expressed to the receptionist. It's not fair on that patient or other patients in the waiting room to hear that information.

"I think it is something that needs to be addressed. There's an element with that particular practice that may need to be picked up but it's something we could possibly address across all 141 practices to highlight that it's really important the receptionist respects confidentiality."

Dr Stone said that when receptionists asked patients about their issues, they were not being "nosy" but trying to help them through the system and be their advocate. "It's negotiating patients through a system that has become more complicated", he added.

"You go back to general practice 10 or 15 years ago it was just GPs, a few nurses and a receptionist. If I look at my own practice, we employ over 35 people, then we've got the additional staff that come in through the PCN (primary care network) and there are a lot more different professions.

"There's an ongoing programme about how we best habilitate patients to recognise and use the system in a better and more effective way to help their care."