Read your NHS App notes!

[mondaytosunday]

Hi in looking at my NHS app just now for test results I saw there were some from when I registered with a new GP. They were about alcohol consumption and they had put my reported per month unit amount as PER DAY!! Amazed they didn’t immediately refer me to Alcohol Anonymous! I’ve informed them of the error. But please check your own notes - data input error is possible.

Hardly any nhs consultants have secretaries these days. If they do they don't type letters. That is all outsourced. In my day it was all done in India. One of the consultants I see types her own during my appointment. She is typing so frantically she barely looks at me. Probably why I am still in as much pain as I was 5 years ago. One department I go to doesn't do any letters at all. I keep notes myself.

It works both ways though, some patients misinterpret what they are told about their health conditions and then report that back when questioned by another HCP on their medical history, who then type it in and then it gets read, believed and copied and becomes 'fact'.

Had a patient the other day, handed over by the care home as having a 'brain tumour' as this was in her care home notes and what the patient herself believed, up to a few months ago i would have just written this in to her medical history on my ambulance PCR because i would have had to take it at face value, and any other crew going forward would have been able to see this, but we now have access to GP summary notes, and in there it was clear that she had a 'lesion' on her optic nerve, not a tumour causing some minor visual changes.

It is so easy for false medical histories to occur and be replicated.

I actually had someone else's notes copied and pasted on to my notes in error.

I knew straight away they were incorrect and complained.

The hospital insisted they were right.

I had to escalate my complaint and it took six months before the consultant admitted he had copied and pasted the notes from the patient he saw before me on to my notes in error.

The incorrect ones were still not removed though but they have a correction in the next page.

It is worrying because someone might not read that far.

They told me it is impossible to remove the incorrect information.

Also had the same happen with a trainee GP who doesn't speak English as her first language.

A lot of what I told her got lost in translation and she recorded pretty much the opposite of what I had said.

I wrote a letter to my own GP correcting the errors and once again the incorrect info remains but a correction follows on the next page.

I also have an alert recorded that I am allergic to a particular medication which I am not allergic to at all.

I have repeatedly told hospital, GP that this is untrue but nobody seems to be able to remove this alert.

It is madness.

Mine said I was allergic to sheep. I have no allergies so god knows where that came from… or why it’s specifically live sheep.

How is that loaded? You did refuse a chaperone and you denied that you could be pregnant. Those are just correct terms.

It’s taken me 30 years to get my name spelt correctly. Started reporting it when it was wrong in my maternity notes when I was pregnant with my eldest. He is 32. I was variously fobbed off, and told it didn’t matter. I pointed out it did matter - to me!