This post is intended alert you to the issue - not to investigate the politics behind it.
Please keep any responses away from that sort of discussion - or the post will be locked.
Thousands of patients potentially harmed by undelivered NHS mail
Safety inquiry launched after private contractor lost 28,563 confidential letters in IT bungle
The NHS has launched a patient safety inquiry after a private contractor lost more than 28,000 pieces of confidential medical correspondence before they were sent to GPs, the Guardian can reveal.
NHS bosses are trying to find out if any patients have been harmed after 28,563 letters detailing discussions at outpatient appointments were not sent because of a mistake by Cerner, an IT company.
The letters should have been sent by doctors at Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals in north London to GPs after consultations with 22,144 patients between June last year and last month.
However, a “clinical harm review” is under way after it was found they had not been dispatched and their whereabouts were unknown.
The 22,144 patients live in the London boroughs of Camden, Islington, Haringey, Barnet and Enfield.
The whole communications of the UK medical system is dreadful.
There are so many places where what should be a clear path with (usually) bi-directional flows just doesn't work, and probably often doesn't exist.
Yes - patient letters, even if they still want to send physical letters for some reason, why not an email to let the person know that the letter is in transit?
And if a specialist has not done the letter to the referrer, that should itself be highlighted and alerted. (Or, of course, the GP to the specialist.)
But what affects so many here, blood test requests that get ignored.
We have to accept that for many reasons some blood tests will not be done. Could be that there is a technical issue. Or the request was inappropriately made. Or is very expensive. Or, as with the classic, Free T3, no-one seems to understand why it would be wanted so just ignore.
I say, if a test is not done, the loop should be closed. The requester (and the patient, if at all interested) should be told a) that it has not been done; b) why it has not been done.
But this needs to be patient-focussed so that anything done even in a private hospital or, say, in Scotland for someone usually reisdent in Wales or England, should reach the patient.
When I worked for the NHS in the 80s we were putting records and drugs onto a big mainframe computer which was so slow because it was very basic. For example we had filters on the screens because of the glare. Several years later I was still working for the NHS and I saw how bad their computers were and I believe there hasn't been much improvement since then.
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