New computer system only records newborn "gender identity"

Daffodil unintentional.
A for whoever is responsible for this rubbish.

Not me @IcakethereforeIam

Today I discovered that our "Workplace" intranet staff notice board automatically assigns our pronouns. The only choices were she/her, he/him and they/them.

I've made myself he/him just to mess with the system.

Let anyone dare challenge me.

The Telegraph aren't buying the NHS's excuses. Tbh, neither am I.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/11/27/nhs-woke-system-record-babies-gender-identity-vs-sex-trans/

https://archive.ph/G2ULQ

Some people think they can spot the 'gender identity' of a toddler. Putting aside the fact that those are usually people who believe in stereotypes which most people moved on from 50 years ago, how long until a parent believes they can spot the 'gender identity' of their newborn and want their baby boy recorded as a girl? I mean that makes as much sense as pretending a grown man is a woman.

All software is binary.

They let you select that you are a very special gender not on the list, don’t worry. That’s working fine. Actual patient care isn’t going so great; but now people can officially bring their whole selves to their patient profiles: isn’t that marvellous?

Maybe the software identifies as non binary or something?

What logic? There isn't logic.

The one single rule is: if it's useful to furthering me/the political agenda I'm riding on = good

not useful to me/agenda = bad. Kill it. Rape it. Destroy it. Exclude it. Jump up and down on it.

That's it. That's all. A psychologist could put a diagnosis on this fairly quickly.

@WomenShouldStillWinWomensSports Oh I completely agree it needs to be fixed but I also think it’s reasonable not to treat it as an absolute priority fix. There are issues that could potentially cause patient harm that need priority at the moment.

Intentionality is irrelevant.
What matters is whether the mistake is allowed to stand.
If we all go "oh understandable computer error, what can you do?" shrug and ignore it, it gets left. The insidious data collection change stands and people get miscategorised. Information is inaccurate.
If we point out all the ways this is detrimental and ridiculous, it is more likely to get changed.
Anyway, computers don't produce errors. Programmers introduce errors in their work. It is most likely a computer programmer with an agenda (or a complete idiot with a poor grasp of language who shouldn't have been on such an important project) whose wording somehow got through alpha and beta testing to the final version because people are still conflating sex and gender.
Words matter.

But surely by TRA logic this means that we are intentionally going to misgender a whole load of babies en masse?

And by actual logic, we are assuming a baby can communicate their gender identity.
Or can the NHS just call off the silliness and maybe admit this is actually constructing an identity for babies based on... observed characteristics? So therefore sex is observed at birth, as we've been saying all along.

What sort of useless information do they think this will yield, anyway? There are no health risks associated with gender identities.

This is silly from every viewpoint and scientifically inaccurate to boot.

I think in this case a number of you are vastly overestimating how checks on the system would have been run, it absolutely is not ‘signed off’ by NhS management in the way you are thinking.

IT projects like this are huge and difficult. This is absolutely an error, and one that I suspect is definitely due to the US origins but it has not been intended by the Trust management.

its not the only issue with the the IT system implementation, they’re having some trouble reporting in some areas and there are a few issues with how patient notes have been uploaded which has resulted in wrong coding being added but they are working through it.

Shows how easy it is to introduce these errors, deliberate or not, into the health system.

What I really don't understand though is why 'gender' when it is being collected like this is only focused on three genders? Since there is over 100, surely every one of them needs unique health care.

Honestly, lobby groups continually show that this is a belief and a belief only with these guidelines and their own focus. They absolutely know this yet try so hard to compel others to believe that this is some how science based fact.

To be fair, a newborn's legal sex is the same as their real sex since only adults can change their legal sex.

In The Times this morning, the hospitals have said 'gender identity' appears on discharge forms but the field is actually named 'legal sex'.

Not just 'sex', which presumably they don't think is a real thing.

I believe both staff and patients overwhelmingly don't favour Genderwoo (wanting basic healthcare to work instead), I'm not sure the same is true of hospital management - and increasingly I think this is where the NHS is failing, with the management. They're the ones in charge and increasingly it seems overriding both patient needs and clinical best practice.

I think hospital management like Genderwoo because it can help them to appear to do stuff whilst in reality not making the hospital run better for anyone (staff or patients) at all.

I read an article recently about the eyewatering funding going into DEI in the NHS but, unlike actual medicine where there are things like death statistics, there seems to be no actual quantification of (or even attempt to quantify) impact. I suppose that fits with 'self ID' though. Given the recent evidence that sexual assault of female surgeons continues apace the DEI initiatives seem to have done sweet fa for women. Then there's cases like Letby where the management were shown to be highly paid yet incredibly irresponsible and stupid. That level of incompetence at the clinical end would result in deaths.

And the ideology is an issue too. NHS management signing up to the idea that feelings matter more than scientific facts and that self identity is all is incredibly harmful in a medical setting.

Somehow, despite the fact that neither patients nor clinicians want it, this ideology has been allowed to run amok in the NHS. And it's done so because it benefits those at the very top.

GSTT & KCH bought in EPIC (also used by UCLH, Addenbrookes, & I think somewhere in Devon[?]) from the US & had support staff over from the States for the first month or so (it went live on 05/10) to try to sort out any issues.

Much as I loathe GenderWoo I’m afraid for me this comes behind the fact clinics had to run at reduced capacity for over a month & there are still problems with quite basic things like issuing prescriptions (patients have been/still are going for weeks without their [highly specialist] medication[s]).

On the patient portal (the two Trusts share one) it asks for your legal sex; gender ID; & “sex assigned at birth”. You definitely don’t have to answer about gender ID - I think your “preferred name” & legal sex are the only fields in that section they get panicky if you’ve not completed 🤔

In this instance, while I’m sure Dr Farquhar is delighted by the - literally - EPIC GenderWoo, I think it’s cock-up over conspiracy. As I said, quite basic bits of the Trusts aren’t functioning; nobody thought about Teams who work outside the standard clinic setting so don’t have someone doing the admin stuff (“you’re here for a PICC line placement? Well I can do it, but it’ll be off the books…” 🤦‍♀️); & the general tolerance for GenderWoo across the Trusts, despite the Rainbow Badge having started at Evelina, really isn’t that high. The demographics (both staff & patients) overwhelmingly do not favour GenderWoo.

Absolutely, but the field is variously titled 'sex' or 'gender' depending on the system...we all knew gender was a polite way of referring to sex so it meant the same thing .... but now 'gender identity'... feels like bending the system at the other end.

I work in MH and our EPR (from the primary care record) does NOT always reflect biological reality - as the primary care record can be changed at patient request. I had always understood that this was via pt liaison with GP. I might not agree with it but it is what I have observed in practice.

I fear this 'gender identity' business on the hospital EPR might just get backfilled on the primary care record...if no one is specifically told system admin ' you must not do that'. I appreciate that tech is only lately introduced in MH compared to acute settings and perhaps this loophole is well managed...but my experience is that we cannot assume this to be true.

Gender and rainbows may be seductive to NHS and Trust management, tech support and NMC but these anomolies get nurses... and drs... in a real bind.

But what happens to babies where the parent states they are not what sex they are... so actually a girl or vice versa? Start a process to correct them?

This is so fucking mental.

It’s so very transphobic to assign a newborn child with an adult’s choice of gender identity. It’s not even as if a gender identity could be observed or scientifically tested, like sex.

There you go - proof that babies are assigned at birth. FFS!

Who decides that goes in that field? If some fuckadoodle parent harangues their midwife claiming their newborn has a gender identity that doesn't match their observed sex, what goes in?

It's interesting because the ICNARC (Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre) manual, which dictates the data that is collected from patients moving through Intensive Care, is very clear that it is biological sex recorded at birth that is entered in the 'sex' field of their data forms.

I strongly suspect this is not a system error, and is a feature not a bug.

Midwifery has revealed a flaw in the system as it applies in their routine care/administration of births, as they will routinely be engaged in the creation of a new patient record (and gender identity is inappropriate).

Creating new healthcare records is rarely the case in other areas of healthcare. Most often a patient record already exists in primary care and this data is electronically transferred from primary care(GP records) to hospital records via confirmation of demographic details with patients ie being routinely asked to confirm your name, dob, NHS No, registered GP etc.

I have never seen a healthcare record that records both sex AND gender identity in the demographic fields.

The correction (if indeed the IT supplier can supply one) in this case will be to change the field gender identity to sex, for births . I say this simply because I didnt see anything in that article that suggested the Trusts want to maintain the integrity of accurate records for older patients....so what about patients who are children or adults?

I suspect

• the hospital records referred to (in this article), the data field labelled 'gender identity' wiĺl be prepopulated from the GP record with sex data (sometimes I've seen this field called gender).

*Hospital staff at intake will be required to ask patient their gender identity and amend the hospital record if there is conflict between gender identity recorded, and pt gender identity self reported.

So what then happens to the primary healthcare care record when the patient is discharged? Will the primary healthcare record (GP) be automatically, or manually updated on receipt of hospital discharge summary? These tasks are often not undertaken by HC professionals who may in all innocence not consider the healthcare implications of accurately recording biological detail.

There is current and clearly ongoing risk of contaminating health care records by removing a reliable source for biological data. Whilst this is most glaring in terms of accurately monitoring growth/development of infants. The case for accurate healthcare records is lifelong.

This is in essence self ID and has been the case for a number of years annoyingly. So I'm glad it's getting sunlight. Thank you for sharing the article.