back to article Choose and Book mixes up patient appointments

The NHS hospital booking service has sent up to 340 patients incorrect appointment data, delaying a software upgrade. According to Connecting for Health (CfH), the agency in charge of the NHS National Programme for IT, a system error led to some patients receiving other people's appointment details. It said the error is still …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Slaine
    Boffin

    340 out of 7 million

    A fraction under 0.005% - not at all bad. How about a big dose of clap all round... bravo bravo. However when Ms Smith shows up for Mr Jones's vasectomy... it is difficult to see how patient confidentiality has not been breached.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    re: 340 out of 7 million

    how do you come to conclusion - A fraction under 0.005%?

    careful reading of article suggests it is written in such a way as make it look good - i.e. what I believe they are saying an upgrade caused 340 errors (that we know of) and as a result upgrade won't be rolled out globally yet/reverted where it has been rolled out

    then they throw in line about 7 million appointments since its inception, to make the number of errors look small – but without any idea of how many problems occurred in earlier versions. It might even be 100% of the appointments made using the new version were errors

  3. TeeCee Gold badge
    Happy

    @Slaine

    "How about a big dose of clap all round... "

    Er, no thanks and you owe me a new keyboard as this one appears to react badly to being soaked in coffee.

  4. Dave Murray
    Thumb Down

    Re: 340 out of 7 million

    Except it's not. It's 340 since 11th April. I've no idea how many appointments are booked through this system in a week but it's going to be a lot less than 7 million.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Upgrade hadn't started...

    "The spokesperson said there did not appear to be a connection between the problems and the upgrade work, which had not started when the wrong appointments were generated."

    It certainly sounds like the upgrade hasn't even been started yet - not that the upgrade caused the problems.

    Seems sensible to put the upgrade off, simply because until they discover the cause of this issue, they can't be sure it isn't in v4. Better to just wait, investigate the problem and roll out v4.1 which includes the fix (or v4 if it doesn't have the problem), than risk having to do 2 roll outs so close together.

  6. Karl Lattimer

    RE: big dose of clap all round

    I'll thank you to keep the clap to yourself...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Happened to me

    I recently booked an appointment online for Monday @ 11am.

    Received a letter confirming my appointment on Thursday @ 10am.

    Gov + IT = FAIL

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    IT & NHS will never work.

    I moved house in march 2002, and told my GP. In september 2003 my optician wrote to my GP recommending I be sent to a consultant regarding a change in my field vision. My GP wrote. Nothing was heard. I chased it, GP wrote again. Nothing.

    After a year, we received a handwritten note from the hospital saying they had a letter returned from the address they were sending the booking to, and was this address my new one. A visit to the GP confirmed that the GP had correctly passed my address on, but the muppets at the hospital were using one they held previously.

    Saw consultant. Diagnosed with glaucoma (so a years delay was a great help). Mysteriously, all his letters never arrived too. Asked him to check the address was right - he looked in file, and there it was clearly printed correctly. All was well.

    Still not receiving any letters. Checked again. He actually phoned his secretary in front of me, and they confirmed the correct address.

    Still no letters.

    Finally, I was being seem by another specialist, and was asked to take my file from one clinic to another. I opened it up and what did I see. A sheet of 24 pre-printed address labels, with the OLD ADDRESS. I took them out, tore them up, and started receiving letters.

    In any system I've built, I only try and store data once, and then reference it. Because I know what can happen if you try and store an address, phone number etc, in different places.....

  9. yeah, right.

    people

    @AC and sheets of old labels...

    So the real problem is muppets with no training in using the computer systems they are given, or the processes that software follows, it seems. Which is typical. Oh look, we've gone over budget, let's cut training since it's all "intuitive" anyway. Hoist by our own petard when trying to sell the damn software in the first place I guess. Try to convince people it's "easy to use" and they turn around and assume you don't need ANY training to use it, or the processes that the software is supposed to automate.

This topic is closed for new posts.