KGH failed to send more than 2,000 letters to GPs

More than 2,000 letters that KGH should have sent to GPs and other health professionals sat waiting in a folder because of IT problems.

In early 2019 the Rothwell Road hospital moved to an automated process to help medical secretaries electronically transfer letters but 1,812 were not sent after being saved in the wrong folder. Another 610 weren't sent because a computer was not configured correctly.

A lack of monitoring meant the issue went undetected for nine months until a GP raised a query in September, leaving the potential for patients to be harmed by delays.

Thankfully nobody was harmed - although some patients had to be reviewed because the letters contained action that needed to be taken.

The hospital's chief digital and information officer, Andrew Callow, said: “This was an isolated incident which has been fully resolved and we have reviewed our automatic system, and our monitoring processes, to make sure it can’t happen again.”

A serious incident investigation took place with its findings made public to the Northants Telegraph under Freedom of Information laws.

All 2,422 unsent letters were reviewed and investigators found that - in all but eight cases - the letters were for information only and did not impact on care.

Mr Callow said: “The eight patients were contacted by hospital clinicians personally to apologise for the issue and to ensure that the required follow-ups were arranged and took place.

“The review of these cases showed that no patient came to any harm as a result of the problem."

The report said the hospital's IT team had not pre-empted a situation where staff would deviate from procedures by creating a subfolder in the system and blamed the incident on 'human error' and IT being unaware a subfolder could be created.

It added that IT staff "took false assurances" that their process was robust.

The hospital said they promptly fixed the issue as soon as they identified it and implemented a set of recommendations including regular auditing and testing of the software, a review of procedures and staff retraining.

Kettering MP Philip Hollobone said: “Thank goodness no-one was medically harmed as a result of this failure.

"It is good that procedures have now been tightened by KGH as a result of this incident.”

The following month GPs who had not received letters as a result of the error were also informed.

The eight patients who had previously been highlighted as at risk of harm received additional information summarising the medical opinion of their clinician for reassurance that they had not come to harm.

Over the following two weeks, 74 patients called a support line to ask further questions.

The serious incident report said: "Whilst the incident was potentially avoidable had ongoing monitoring been in place, once discovered, it was handled appropriately with immediate mitigating actions taken.

"Resources were focused on ensuring that patient harm was minimised and closing the breach by ensuring that no further messages were saved to incorrect folders."

The incident happened as KGH exited special measures for the first time in two years.

The delay in sending the letters was also a data breach under the Data Protection Act and GDPR.

An Information Commissioner’s Office spokesman said: “We were made aware of this incident and looked into the details.

"We provided data protection advice to the hospital and concluded no further action was necessary at this time."