If you ever think you're having a bad day at work, just remember, you could have done this

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-64116668

A GP surgery accidentally told patients they had aggressive lung cancer instead of wishing them a merry Christmas. Askern Medical Practice sent the message to people registered with the Doncaster surgery on 23 December.

Oops.

I saw that and some people were actually waiting for results of their lung scans...:-( what a shock to get that.

And dont forget someone did and will most likely be very upset about it so I dont think we necessarily need a thread about it as well as it being plastered all over the national news.

People make mistakes sometimes horrible mistakes with grave consequences. Just thank God it wasn't you and move on.

A lot of people in a lot of situations would’ve been very distressed to have received that message. How awful.

If I genuinely had cancer I'd be pretty upset to receive a diagnosis over text message instead of in person.

It wasn't actually a message telling someone about their diagnosis it was a text message to someone within the practice asking them to fill in a form for a patient with that diagnosis. They do not inform people of their cancer diagnosis by text.

Pretty poor taste thread really OP.

An awful thing to have happened, but also corrected quickly. At least it wasn't the last thing the surgery did begire closing for Christmas.

I once sent out the wrong flood warning. 😳

I used to be a Practice Manager. Of all the things I had to do, sending a batch bulk text messages was by far one of the most stressful things.

I used to check and re check and get someone else to check and was still always paranoid something would go horribly wrong. I can still feel the stomach wrench as your finger hovers over the mouse to click send!

For those saying you shouldn't be told about a cancer diagnosis by text, indeed you shouldn't be, but the system is far from perfect. My father was in hospital with a DVT when a nurse came with medication. He queried it, and was told that it was because of his cancer. He does indeed have cancer, but no-one had told him at that point.... (it turned out he had had tests which could diagnose cancer, and the DVT was relevant, but even so....)

I do feel very sorry for the person who clicked 'send'. I work in an industry which frequently sends out messages to (combined) millions of people. You can double/triple check but there's always the nagging fear you might have sent the wrong message to the wrong group of people. Human error is always a possibility.

I hope the person who did it hasn't been disciplined or sacked. They must feel utterly horrendous.

Why would that even be a stored text anyway?

Bad enough to send a text by mistake to a lot of people..

But sending that text to someone who had that diagnosis.

I think there is more to this than is being told

My mums doctor delivered the news

do you want the good news or the bad news?
the good news is we know what’s wrong, the bad news it’s cancer

theyd repeatedly told her she had cystitis, it was of course ovarian cancer

not all doctors are the same thankfully

That's more than a mistake, for fucks sake.

Its a strange message to have stored to enable someone to send it out en masse I would have thought.

I'm not familiar with the databases and mailmerge software generally used in GP practices, but it's clear they must have them, and very useful they are too, for sending out a mass message to particular groups of patients inviting them to book a flu jab or similar, or once in a way to the entire patient list advising them that the opening hours have changed, for example. Clearly somebody got the settings badly wrong here and instead of sending a text to one patient who (let's hope) already knew their diagnosis, this message went to the entire patient list. Horribly easily done.

I used to work for a university. On occasion somebody who had authority to send emails to certain huge mailing lists made a similar mistake and thousands of employees would get a message meant for one person. Dozens of them would then hit reply all in their haste to say they didn't know they were on this mailing list and wanted to be removed, they didn't think the message was meant for them, please could people stop hitting reply all, etc etc. Chaos.

Well I doubt they did it on purpose so it is a mistake. People make them and people can feel so bad about making them they kill themselves especially when their mistake makes the major news outlets.

My fil was once summoned back from holiday abroad.. Apparently he needed invasive tests for his recent health scare...
Turned out it was a man with similar - but not that similar - surname.. Often wonder how that didn't induce a serious health scare...
Guess GP's are human after all.

Absolutely shocking . How can this even happen .

Really, really poor taste OP. Your second post doesn't redeem this either.

Poor to put this up, the sender must feel absolutely awful .

Please

It's all over the news, the media etc

A thread on MN makes no difference

This is very funny, thanks OP

So they should.