On news reports - is there a reason why hospital notes go missing so often?

[PinkBottleGreenBottle]

I don't have any personal experience of this. But I was listening to the news this morning, an investigation over medical treatment that had gone badly wrong, and once again when they went to look back, the hospital records had gone missing. It struck me that nearly always seems to be the case in most reports of this kind that I hear. I'm sure I've also seen threads on here where something has happened in hospital that can't be properly looked into because the records have are missing, or occasionally have been destroyed in error.

Is this a known issue? Is there a particular reason for it? For example, I know that a while ago there was a disastrous attempt at centralising medical notes, so maybe there are database problems? But if they go missing at these times, then presumably they go missing at other times as well... as I said, I have no experience. I just wondered if someone else had more insight into it.

It's ok, I can out grump anyone on the right day .

The thing is that Trusts ploughed on with IT implementation through the palaver that was NPfIT. Some came out of it with shiny new systems, others carried on with their original plans and some were left with nothing and are only now really buckling down and getting their implementations off the ground.

I'm currently working on a project in a trust. By next April they will be paperless across mental health, children's and community services. But, it's costing a lot of money!

The IT security thing is a problem. Whether it's worse than someone picking up an unguarded set of notes from a trolley, I'm not sure. . Staff are getting better at being a bit more savvy about it but again, lack of time leads to cutting corners.

The EPR is already happening across the NHS, in a small way in some areas that's true, but there are certainly trusts which are almost paperless.

The hospital where I'm a patient still uses big trolleys full of paper notes - that's the one that lost my original scans and notes. It's the same hospital that had a backlog of 3,000 unreported diagnostic images - later it was one of the first to go for electronic sharing of images, dunno how that's worked out (clearly didn't help me).

Must ask my sister how it works in her trust - she's a community nurse.