Critics said the latest data loss, from nine health trusts including Bolton Royal Hospital and Sefton Merseyside PCT, raises fresh questions about the Government's handling of confidential personal data and the future of the new NHS database.
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "This is further evidence of the Government's failure to protect the personal information which we provide.
"Following the HMRC and DVLA failures we will need further steps on the part of the Department of Health to show how their planned electronic patients' database will protect our medical records."
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "The whole culture of data management in the public sector has to change."
Some 168,000 people are thought to have been affected by the breaches of strict data protection rules by the nine health trusts.
The DoH initially said it did not have details of how many patients were affected in each case as the breaches were being dealt with locally.
But last night it dismissed suggestions that hundreds of thousands of patients were involved - saying it believed 168,000 had been affected.
It confirmed that City and Hackney Primary Care Trust had lost the clinical details of 160,000 patients after a computer disc failed to arrive at its destination at St Leonard's Hospital, in east London. But it said the data had been encrypted to an "extremely high level of security".
A DoH spokesman said: "We believe that an additional 8,000 patients in total may have been affected, but even amongst these only a small proportion involves some clinical data, and there is no evidence that this has fallen into the wrong hands." Tweet
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The problem is not with the new IT system but with the people who lack the skills to operate such systems.
It's no good sending people on one and two day courses and expect them to be up to speed with new technology.
Get rid of some of the upper management who still think a Biro is new technology, pay them off it will be cheaper in the long run.
I opted out of the NHS data "spine" last year for precisely this reason, but it took some doing. Firstly they don't tell you that you have the option. Secondly you have to do it in writing via your GP. Of course no-one had told my GP about opting out either, and so it was down to me to convince him that it all above board.
As with the NIR and other government agencies, they want to put all your details in one big database, because they think this will make the world a better, safer place, and above all because they think they are entitled to do it and want to discourage you from disagreeing with them. However as with all govenment agencies it's always done to the lowest denominator, as we have seen so readily in recent days.