IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records

The English hospitals recovered patient care data only. IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records. Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav A “human error” in the IT department led to Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) losing data from maternity records over an 11-year span.

The data loss occurred on August 18, the English hospitals announced in a blog post on Monday spotted by The Register. The problem is “the result of human error” during routine technical work while “creating a copy of a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes.” The post reads: The process used a set of pre-written computer instructions that had previously been used for a different hospital system. A setting that should have been changed before the process was run was missed.

As a result, the process was carried out on a maternity database instead of the radiotherapy database, causing the maternity records database to be overwritten. The overwritten database held data from NUH’s previous maternity database, which included maternity records for women and babies who received care from NUH from September 2011 to November 2022. NUH has been unable to retrieve some of the data,: … we have not been able to restore the complete history showing who viewed maternity records during this period.

As a result, in most cases, we may be unable to confirm whether a maternity record was viewed by a particular person between September 2011 and November 2022.