SUMMARIES OF SELECTED STATEMENTS
Norwegian health authorities. The Ministry replied that it was unable to verify
whether the statement of 4 February 1997 of the Health Authority was identical with the statement enclosed with the letter from 1999 as the enclosure had
not been registered to the case to which the letter had been registered. In the
letter from 1999, the enclosure was referred to as ‘a statement of 4 February
1997 from the Danish Health Authority’.
The Ombudsman was of the opinion that in pursuance of the ex officio investigation principle, the Ministry of Health should have investigated the case
in more detail with a view to verifying whether the documents were identical.
This could have been done, for instance, by contacting the Norwegian authorities to which the letter with the enclosed statement was sent in 1999. In
the Ombudsman’s opinion a requirement for the Ministry to contact, among
others, the Norwegian authorities could also follow from the Ministry being
required to make reasonable efforts to reconstruct the enclosure, which had
erroneously not been registered to the case.
The Ombudsman therefore recommended that the Ministry of Health reopen
the case in order to investigate it in more detail and make a new decision on
the right of access to the statement of the Danish Health Authority. In addition, the Ombudsman recommended that the Ministry reconsider whether
access could be granted according to the principle of extended openness, also
because the statement was 20 years old and in the light of the specific contents
of the statement compared with the answer to the parliamentary question.
2017-24. Access to decisions concerning a doctor who had been
criticised by the Disciplinary Board of the Danish Healthcare System
could not be denied
A woman complained to the Ombudsman because the Disciplinary Board of
the Danish Healthcare System had denied her access to some decisions. The
decisions had previously been publicly available on the website of the Danish
Patient Safety Authority under the rules on the publication of decisions in complaint cases about health services. The patients’ identities had been anonymised
in the published decisions, but the doctor’s identity had not.
In the decisions, the Disciplinary Board had expressed criticism of the doctor
in connection with his activities as a doctor of psychiatry in private practice.
The Board had denied the woman access to the decisions with reference to section 30 paragraph (1) of the Access to Public Administration Files Act, under
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