NHS in fresh cancer scandal
THOUSANDS of patients may have missed cancer screenings and jabs in a fresh NHS scandal dating back up to a decade, it emerged last night.
Health officials are looking into concerns that adults who should have been screened for breast and bowel cancer were not sent invitations, and that children missed out on crucial jabs. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, is due to be updated on the scale of the risks on Monday. It is the first healthcare scandal to emerge since he took office last month. Three months ago, Jeremy Hunt, his predecessor, apologised for errors in a cancer screening scandal that may have resulted in up to 75 deaths.
Then, hundreds of thousands of women who should have been offered
mammograms missed out on them, after errors in instructions given to computer programmers in 2009. The latest blunders are thought to relate to part of the NHS medical records system.
Concerns relate primarily to 55,000 patient records, some of which could date back as far as 2008, according to the Health Service Journal. Appointments that patients may not have been invited to include child immunisation, hearing screenings for newborns, patient safeguarding, bowel cancer screening, breast screening and abdominal aortic aneurysm screening.
The investigation is understood to be at an early stage and there is currently no direct evidence any patients have been harmed.
But a document by officials from NHS England and NHS Improvement, obtained by the Health Service Journal, expresses concerns about potential “risk of harm” to patients associated with 120,000 discrepancies between two national IT NHS systems. The concerns relating mainly to the 55,450 patient records appear on one national database, called the Personal Demographics Service.
And though they relate to that number of files, it may not affect as many patients, because some people may have more than one affected file.
According to the document, produced earlier this month, urgent work was under way to “calculate or estimate the numbers of patients who have been affected”, including loss of access to health services.
“This must be achieved by August 12, 2018, so that the scale of the subsequent service response/patient contact strategy is clear and so that the [secretary of state] can make a public announcement which has sufficient accuracy,” the document states.
An NHS England spokesperson said: “NHS Digital, Public Health England and NHS England are working with GP practices to analyse and reconcile the discrepancies between these two systems.”