New computer system only records newborn "gender identity"

[Rainbowshit]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12790873/Now-hospitals-record-newborn-babies-gender-identity-sex.html

I mean FFS. How could this have happened by accident when there would have been extensive testing?It's clearly deliberate.

This will have been tested and signed off by countless people in the NHS. None of who appear to know that babies don't have a gender identity. Scary.

No way is that a mistake. No way.

I totally disagree with Prof Jenny Gamble that 'gender identity' is important in later life. I've got through almost 70 years without one.

At least they say they are going to rectify this nonsense. I just hope the whistle-blowing midwives go to the press if they don't.

Exactly.

Someone wrote it, then more people approved it, then it went through other layers until someone bought it, and read it, and approved it and it went through more layers there.

In two separate, famous hospitals.

Nice try, fellas.

I introduce to you my frost-gendered demiboi fluid infant.

Quite how that information is going to be of any use to anyone at all, particularly the infant, or serve any purpose beyond my enjoyment of extending my exciting identity onto a child I'm not sure.

Or could it be another forced attempt to turn sex into gender on paper and compel everyone to participate in this niche belief? You know, against the articles of the Human Rights Act?

Not one person in that chain of sign off said no.

The NHS is so fucked.

The only way to deal with this is for everyone to give stupid answers like "my child hasn't decided what their gender identity is yet" or "my child is being raised as nonbinary until they are 7 and then I will let them decide" or "demifluidpixiegender" to fuck with the system until they decide it's too much hassle and just go back to asking for biological sex instead.

How is there a single adult who thinks a baby has the capacity to form an identifiable, coherent identity?

Jenny Gamble, professor of midwifery at Coventry University, said: 'Sex is not assigned at birth, that is delusional. A baby cannot have a gender identity, because it's a baby. Gender identity is important later in life but it never erases the importance of sex.'

Sort of. But it's missing a key point. I've added a few words to help with clarification.

Jenny Gamble, professor of midwifery at Coventry University, said: 'Sex is not assigned at birth, that is delusional. A baby cannot have a gender identity, because it's a baby. Gender identity is important later in life to any people who believe that we all have a gender identity, but it never erases the importance of sex.'

The compelled belief that everyone has a gender identity has no place in health care as a fact. If someone believes in it, that's OK. It can be recorded as additional information, the same as religious beliefs are. But their gender (identity) has no bearing on their actual sex.

Honestly,my Dd1's friend was diagnosed with sepsis last week. There was no bed for her,she was placed in a corridor. Then there were no antibiotics,so she had to be moved elsewhere to where there were. She ended up discharging herself as she had no faith in actually getting onto a ward or the right treatment.

One automatically thinks,"oh the NHS is so underfunded,they need more money." Then you read of the eye watering sums of money spent on this totally inaccurate computer system that apparently no one had checked before it went live. No,the NHS does not need more money,it needs to spend the money it has more wisely on actual health care,not dodgy ideology.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.