The mix-up happened earlier this week and has left both parties — expat Duncan Anderson and the woman who declined to be named — worried it could be happening to other people.
"I’ve had all sorts of issues with Dunedin Hospital, but this is the last straw for me," the woman said.
"These records are supposed to be private and they have some pretty intimate feminine stuff in them."
The woman said she was worried about the implications of the mishap.
"I was lucky the other person was honest enough to contact me on social media.
"It could have been far worse — it’s such an invasion of privacy."
Mr Anderson said he was surprised to discover the mix-up, after he requested his medical records for employment purposes.
"It’s obvious someone at Health New Zealand [HNZ] typed in the wrong code numbers, scanned the wrong document and forgot to check.
"It’s just not right."
Mr Anderson said he searched for the woman as soon as he discovered he had her records.
"As you would expect, she didn’t seem very happy about the fact I had been sent them."
He said he had contacted HNZ, which had apologised.
The woman had moved back to Dunedin about eight months ago and had requested the records after a recent hospital stay.
"The whole thing has been mortifying."
HNZ southern group director of operations Hamish Brown apologised for the incident.
"On July 24, our team at Dunedin Hospital made an error and inadvertently sent by email a scanned copy of health records to an incorrect patient."
Mr Brown said HNZ "immediately apologised" to the two people involved and had also notified the breach to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
"Health NZ takes privacy very seriously and we strive to be good kaitiaki [guardians] of the information we are entrusted with.
"We have strong policies and processes in place to ensure patient privacy but unfortunately these processes were not correctly followed on this occasion.
"We are working with staff to review our administrative processes to see how they can be improved to ensure an error like this does not happen again."
The woman was filing a complaint.
"I’ve got ongoing treatment at the hospital, possibly for the rest of my life. I don’t want this to happen to me or anyone else again.
"They really need to check their standards of the staff’s privacy knowledge."
