Hunt stayed silent over 700,000 lost letters to patients

JEREMY HUNT kept quiet for months about a “major blunder” that resulted in more than 700,000 letters to NHS patients being mislaid, some of which contained cancer diagnoses, treatment plans and blood tests.

The Health Secretary learnt in March 2016 that letters had been left to pile up in a warehouse by NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), which is co-owned by the Department of Health.

But a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that Mr Hunt “decided not to alert Parliament or the public” even though officials knew as early as December 2015 that the letters contained “clinical correspondence” and staff had binned 35 sacks.

The NAO found that more than 1,700 patients could have been harmed. NHS England and NHS SBS discovered 709,000 items of unprocessed mail, which had been building up since 2011.

Yet when Mr Hunt informed Parliament via a two-paragraph written statement on July 21 last year, he made no reference to patient safety or the scale of the problem.

He simply said there had been “an issue with [the] mail redirection service”. NHS England estimates that the cost of the incident will be at least £6.6 million for administration alone, said the report. “This was a colossal blunder, which has put 1,788 people in harm’s way – and this figure could be much, much higher,” said Tim Farron, the outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats. “This disaster left patient data, which includes blood

test results and cancer screening, languishing in a warehouse. People in the department must be held accountable for this shoddy affair.”

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth called for an apology from Mr Hunt, calling it “a total scandal” and a “staggering catalogue of mistakes”.

The problem first came to light in 2011, when NHS SBS inherited a backlog of clinical correspondence from primary care trusts in the East Midlands.

The NAO report concluded: “Senior managers within the NHS SBS primary care services business unit knew about the clinical risk to patients … but it did not develop a plan to deal with the backlog.” Auditors discovered that staff deemed the mail “a lower priority… as there were no performance indicators attached to it”.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “As the NAO report highlights, patient safety has been our first priority and no cases of harm have been identified to date.”

An NHS England spokesman said it was deeply concerned to be belatedly informed about the backlog. “We immediately set up a team, including clinical experts, to manage the incident, and all relevant correspondence has now been sent back to GPS for review.”