Probe into claims Southport victims' NHS records accessed

Image source, PA Media Image caption, The victims were all injured at a children's dance class in Southport's Hart Street in July 2024 By Daniel Wittenberg and Judith Moritz , Special correspondent  and  Angela Ferguson , North West Published 14 July 2026, 18:20 BST Updated 6 minutes ago An NHS ambulance trust is investigating accusations that staff inappropriately accessed the records of victims of the Southport attack. The father of one of the young girls seriously injured in the July 2024 attack said he was "appalled" at the possibility and accused staff at North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) of wanting to "satisfy their own morbid curiosity". It comes after it emerged in May that dozens of workers at Aintree Hospital, where some of the injured were treated, had looked at the records with no good reason. NWAS chief executive Salman Desai said: "We have identified concerns about potential inappropriate access to patient records and are formally investigating the matter." Three young girls - Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King, and Elsie Dot Stancombe - were murdered in the attack, while 10 others were physically injured. The father of a girl who was 13 when she was injured but survived the attack said: "It is a complete breach of trust in our darkest hours as a family and dampens how you feel about the amazing work they do to save lives. "It was already incredibly difficult to think that staff at Aintree hospital had needlessly pried into our daughter's condition." The man cannot be identified due to an anonymity order protecting his daughter, who had been helping to supervise the dance class before she was stabbed in the back and arm. Solicitors acting for the girl and for another 21 of the 23 girls who survived the attack are calling for a full-scale review by NHS England into the guidance and disciplinary procedures for staff who inappropriately access patient data. The calls come after another trust, NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group (UHLG), admitted in May that nearly 50 staff members at Aintree Hospital had looked inappropriately at the medical records of some of the injured victims in the days after the attack. Fletchers Solicitors, which is already investigating this breach, said the family were reviewing documents given to them by UHLG about the breaches at Aintree, when they saw information that said staff from North West Ambulance Service might have also accessed their daughter's records without cause. 'Multiple chances' They said a document stated that under 10 individuals might have inappropriately accessed the incident within the ambulance service. The father explained that after learning about the Aintree incident, "to then learn that ambulance staff have done the same and we have only found out by raking through these documents is appalling". He said the NHS trusts were still unable to tell them with certainty whether photographs of their daughter's injuries were viewed by staff and "so we don't know what to believe".