There has been some concern about security in the medical community after a report found nurses and clinicians storing photographs of patients on personal devices.

A study by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the Menzies School of Health Research has found 48 per cent of medical staff took photos of their patient's condition if they thought it would be useful. Of that group; most used hospital-owned equipment, but about a fifth said they used mobile phones and stored the images personally.

Alison Verhoeven from the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association said measures need to be put in place to protect both staff and patients: “There seems to be a perception that asking for verbal consent to take a photo is sufficient, and that neither protects doctor or the patient. So I guess an issue to think about there is actually collecting consent in a written form so that it's actually something to store with the image,” she said.

The study was conducted across thirteen wards of a single hospital and has now been published in The Australian Health Review.

Health authorities are taking the emerging issue very seriously, with several measures already proposed to allow practitioners the ease of using personal photography devices, but provides a regulated system for storing and destroying the images.

AHHA Chief executive Alison Verhoeven says: “What we'd want to see I think is that any photos taken in any form of digital photography actually stored in an appropriate digital asset management software system in a medical image database that's properly managed, where the records around consent and conditions around storage are managed by the hospitals.”

Access to the most recent edition of the Australian Health Review is available through CSIRO.