SOOKE, B.C. — A bill passed in May is facing scrutiny for forcing patients to provide private information if their bodily fluids come into contact with their rescuers.
“A lot of members in the course of their duty are bitten, stuck with a hypodermic needle, they get into an altercation and there’s an exchange of blood – you yourself may be cut or the suspect may be bleeding,” Saanich Police Chief Michael Chadwick told the Sooke News Mirror.
“It’s going to be for those types of situations where... you don’t know whether they have a communicable disease like HIV, or Hep C or Hep B.”
B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said that the bill has a “serious impact on the privacy rights of individuals.”
But Oak Bay Deputy Police Chief Kent Thom said the legislation is not meant as a privacy invasion but as a means to protect first responders who are just doing their jobs.
“It’ll give members more confidence to the fact that they’re a little bit better protected, and their families and the general public will be, too,” he said. “It simply puts our members in a better position when they are out there doing what is required to keep the community safe.”
But Denham said the bill will not be useful because there are “very few instances where emergency responders contract communicable diseases.”
And even if a rescuer does come in contact with a patient’s fluids, the amount of time it would take a judge to make a decision would be well past the ideal “immediate post-exposure treatment” timeline, Denham said.