Almost one in four patients in England I found errors in their medical records, such as errors about their illness, medications they presented, or the treatment they received.
The errors led to patients One missing in diagnostic tests Or treatment, refuse to care or obtain the medications they did not need.
In some cases, their official medical history said incorrectly that they have diseases that they had not previously suffered.
Healthwatch England, who revealed the number of times that the inaccuracy occurred in medical records, urged NHS to make more effort “to obtain the basics correctly” when employees record the details of patients and care for them.
In a representative survey that included 1,800 adults living in England, 409 (23 %) said that they encountered missing errors or details, such as the name of birth or the date of birth, in patients’ records.
Louise Ansari, CEO of Healthwatch, said that some errors are very dangerous so that they could put patients, for example by losing the treatment they need.
She said that the body, the patient’s health service champion in England, was assigned the survey after the patients told her “worrying cases” with medical records.
Ansari said: “The missed information and errors in the medical records are frustrating and can endanger the health of people. The sorting of management problems is not always easy and can take a long time, which leads to pressure on patients or their families.”
Among the reported errors:
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26 % relate to personal details such as a name or date of birth.
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16 % included the medications taken by the patient.
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9 % of the errors are incorrectly included in the patient as a specific disease
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9 % said the patient had taken specific medications to treat a disease.
Among that group, 10 % said they had been subjected to inappropriate error or drugs as a result of error, and 9 % said they had received unsafe treatment. One out of eight (12 %) said that inaccurate or missing information led to rejection of treatment.
The Patient Society said that errors in the records, which can occur during care in GP or hospital surgery, can lead to “serious delay, wrong diagnosis, lost care.”
“Since January, we have received more than 100 lines inquiries about this problem, and the patient’s guide contains access to medical records to several hundreds of downloads,” said Rachel Power, CEO of the association.
“Behind each of these mistakes, there is a real person who faces anxiety and uncertainty about his care. Many of these cases include incorrect or missing diagnoses and treatments, and callers tell us that these errors are often committed in GP practices or sometimes in secondary care.
“We understand Tremendous pressure Healthcare staff face. But inaccuracy like this can lead to a dangerous delay, the wrong diagnosis and lost care, which is simply unacceptable and interesting to patients. These records of these records not only exacerbate the disease, but also add great stress during difficult times. “
She said that patients should be able to trust that their medical records are correct and they should not be forced to repeat their medical history repeatedly or spend time searching for their own records.
He told patients differently healthwatch about how errors in their records mean that they have been given a possible wrong drug for their disease because GP did not know that they had a bag, or they were misleading about hyperactivity disorder and attention disorder due to the information mixture that includes GP surgery and a special diagnostic service.
The national voices, an alliance of charities for health and care, said that the mistakes were very common in paper records and digital records NHS It confirms that some are closer to “Swiss cheese records”.
“There is a lot of talking about how to convert NHS from analog to digital to making it more efficient and effective. But realizing that this new brave future requires a solid basis for precise data, not Swiss cheese records, which create a mountain of problems for patients and doctors,” said Jacob Lantu, CEO.
Professor Camilla Hotorenin, President of the Royal College GPSThe family doctors said they will care very much about the results.
She said: “There may be many reasons that cause administrative errors. But infrastructure for insufficient information technology, intensive work burdens and workforce pressure in public practice, high levels of unnecessary bureaucracy and poor communication between different parts of health service in the errors that are committed.”
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare said: “It is unacceptable that patients lose treatments and vital tests simply due to errors in their medical records,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.
“This government inherited the analog NHS, but we are committed to entering it in the digital age through our plan for change. We will create a suitable health service for the future and put patients in their medical history through one patient’s record, summarize the patient’s health information, test results and messages in one place through the NHS application.”
