The NHS is known for it’s extremely poor administration systems. Many of this blog’s readers will have had the misfortune to have had to endure long waits for treatment, poorly handled healthcare administration and the sort of piss poor communication that would shame a particularly badly run Soviet tractor factory.

However the ever incompetent NHS has managed to uncover 24,000 letters that should have been sent to patients and others languishing in a file that nobody seemed to know existed.

Sky News said:

A hospital trust has admitted it failed to send out 24,000 letters to GPs since 2018 and is checking to see if patients were affected.

The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Trust has apologised for any “anxiety or inconvenience” caused after confirming documents, including discharge summaries and clinic letters, may not have been sent out over the last five years.

The trust, which runs the two main hospitals in Newcastle – the Freeman Hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary – said the documents represented less than 0.3% of all patient contacts and is taking “immediate steps to address the issue” and “working quickly to put things right”.

Chief operating officer Martin Wilson said that earlier this month the trust “identified a number of documents in our electronic patient record which may not have been sent to GPs”, including “discharge summaries and clinic letters, as well as internal documents from the last five years”.

The oversight was uncovered after routine inspections by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in June and July.

A computer glitch put letters requiring sign-off from a senior doctor into a folder few staff knew existed, according to the BBC.

If you thought the NHS’s paper records system was awful well it seems that their digital records system is either just as bad or maybe worse. Although the hospital is saying that this only relates to 0.3% of patient contacts this is still in my view a monstrous faux pas. Some patients might have been rebooked for clinics or have had discharge letters resent but what might have happened to those patients who were not re-contacted or rebooked? We might be looking at a situation where patients may have missed vital appointments and thereby have had their medical conditions worsen maybe terminally so.

This is yet another example of the NHS not being able to get the basic stuff, such as contacting patients and other healthcare professionals in an accurate and timely manner right. The NHS is a shitshow and urgently needs to be replaced with a system that is affordable and which works for the patients and not, as it is at present, works for the staff. If you continue to clap for the NHS shitshow then you must be utterly and completely mad.