Hospital discharge letters ‘a year late’ claim GP leaders

It has been revealed that ‘hundreds’ of discharge letters to GPs from Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust have been arriving over a year late.

GPs have called for an urgent investigation when batches of the letters dating to April and May of last year began to turn up in health centres and GP practices. They have written to the Trust’s Medical Director Dr Sally Bradley asking for an explanation and requesting information about how many more undelivered letters remain in the system.

The Trust has begun an investigation and doctor’s leaders say that it has been told by the Trust that the delays were due to 'a fault within the IT system'.

‘Pulse’, the GPs’ magazine revealed earlier this year that a London-based NHS Trust was reviewing the deaths of 25 patients after data-reporting incidents resulted in over a thousand cancer patients who may have failed to have been seen within the two-week Department of Health target as a result.

Dr John Hughes, a GP based at Crumpsall was reported in ‘Pulse’ as having had what he described as ‘a huge dump’ of 140 delayed discharge letters landing on his desk and practice staff had to sift though them all urgently in order to check that vital treatments had not been delayed. One of the patients had cancer but thankfully, in this case, treatment had not been delayed.

Dr Hughes claimed that the problems went back at least ’10 years’ and said that he knew of several local practices that had been similarly affected.

A Trust spokesman said: “At the end of June this year, local GPs alerted us that they had received excessive numbers of discharge summaries generated via our Automated Letter System (ALS).

“We immediately started an investigation into this. The investigation is ongoing.”

Hospital discharge letters often contain important and urgent information relating to patients’ treatments as well as follow-up advice. The ALS system was designed to provide an automated, streamlined system for ensuring the timely and accurate distribution of discharge information to GPs.

Local health-campaigner,  Jean Ashworth described the situation as "appalling" and said that she had raised this issue several times over the years; most recently in October 2011.

Only last month, it was announced that Christine Walters, the lead for Information, Management and Technology (IM&T) at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust had been short listed as a nominee for this year’s Healthcare IT Champion of the Year Award.

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/62665/worry-over-discharge-letters

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