Personal Data Protection Training Sessions in Healthcare and Police - Similar Problems
Accredited Lecturers from the Commissioner’s Office, Nataša Mirjanić, Marko Milošević, and Marin Cetinić, in cooperation with the Serbian Chamber of Health Institutions, on October 4 in Pirot and October 25 in Leskovac, held two training sessions for Healthcare Sector workers from the Pirot, Toplica, and Jablan district. At the training sessions held, representatives of healthcare institutions from the territory of the said districts had the opportunity to get acquainted more closely with the modus for exercising the right to access information of public importance and personal data protection, to remove doubts and broaden their existing knowledge. In the field of free access to information, errors in the actions of public authorities when responding to information seekers were pointed out, regarding the dimensions of the problems faced by representatives of public authorities in terms of "frequent lucratively inspired requests for the same type of information" in the absence of a legally regulated concept of this right's abuse. In the field of personal data protection, the importance of harmonizing regulations in health care was emphasized, using examples from the law regulating healthcare records and the law regulating patient rights. Around 40 representatives of various healthcare institutions of these districts attended the training sessions.
Training sessions for representatives of the Police Departments in Požarevac (October 8), Kikinda (October 15), Niš (October 17) and Kragujevac (October 25) were held by Marko Milošević, Marin Cetinić, and Emina Kovačević, in cooperation with Dragan Obradović, the Data Protection Officer in the MUP, and with the support of the OSCE Mission to Serbia. The police representatives were introduced to data processing principles, data protection mechanisms, and the application of these principles by illustrating examples from the Commissioner's practice. In the discussion that followed, an insight into the doubts was gained in the application of the Law on Personal Data Protection and the application of other regulations in the police, raising the polemic about the powers of the police to collect data on ID'ed persons, and then to submit them "at the justified request of other natural persons". (Art. 75 of the Law on Police). Around 250 employees of these Police Departments attended these trainings.
At both trainings, the raising issue was collecting data on employee diagnosis when opening sick leave when exercising their other rights guaranteed by law or contract. The participants pointed to the problem of determining the number of days allocated to postpartum women, that is, in the case of MUP employees, whether there are reasons why a person could not work with arms.
Continuing the activities of raising awareness about the rights in the Commissioner jurisdiction among these two target groups till the end of the year, training sessions are planned for healthcare workers in the Pčinj and Niš districts, and in the remaining eight Police Departments in Serbia.
