Unfair dismissal surely?
Ok, there has been a lot of incredibly high profile data loss stories going on in recent months, but this is surely taking far too drastic action. To dismiss the manager for having his laptop stolen is outrageous... It's not like he asked the theives to come and steal it while he was away.
As has been said, data security shouldn't be managed by the individuals, it should be managed by the business IT dept. What were patients records doing on his laptop anyway? Shouldn't that all be stored in a secure central database somewhere, which the employees access using a VPN of some description, like everyone else in the real world does?