The NHS’s loss of more than half a million pieces of confidential medical correspondence is so serious that it has triggered five separate investigations, ministers have admitted.
The disclosure has prompted claims that the scale of the loss of 515,000 test results and doctors’ letters was hidden in “a huge cover-up”. It raises fresh questions for the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who has publicly championed openness in the NHS.
The National Audit Office (NAO) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are currently looking into the incident, which the Guardian revealed last month, according to parliamentary questions that the health minister Nicola Blackwood answered on Friday.
Their investigations follow three other inquiries already undertaken by the Department of Health (DH), NHS England and NHS Shared Business Services (SBS), Blackwood said.
SBS is the private firm, co-owned by the DH, which mislaid the highly sensitive correspondence between 2011 and 2016 by putting items in a warehouse and forgetting to send them on to 7,700 GP surgeries across England despite their importance for patients’ health and treatment.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats have intensified their claims that the DH has been highly evasive about the scandal after Blackwood said the DH would not publish the results of any of the three investigations already completed.
“It is totally incredible that the secretary of state failed for so long to identify this catalogue of errors, and it beggars belief that Jeremy Hunt is refusing to publish the advice which he received,” said Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary. “This is a major scandal, and Jeremy Hunt needs to come clean with the public.”
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, criticised the DH for “really disturbing” secrecy. “The fact that five separate investigations have been launched shows that the government and NHS England both knew that this was a monumental blunder,” he said. “But Jeremy Hunt’s attempt to downplay the severity of it, when all this was happening, smacks of a huge cover-up.”
The Guardian’s disclosure forced Hunt to answer an urgent question in the Commons on 27 February, when he downplayed the seriousness of the incident. But the DH’s own permanent secretary, Chris Wormald, confirmed to MPs on the public accounts committee on the same day that doctors were still examining whether more than 500 patients may have come to harm as a result.
Medical investigators are also looking into the possibility that the incident contributed to some patient deaths.
Hunt’s behaviour is under scrutiny after he admitted to MPs that he was first told about the data loss on 23 March 2016, but did not acknowledge it publicly until 21 July. Even then he only did so in a 138-word statement on the last day of parliamentary business, and mentioned neither the huge number of documents involved or the possibility that patients may have been harmed.
The DH’s refusal to publish the results of any of the three inquiries means that Hunt is avoiding scrutiny of what he knew and when, and what he did or did not do as a result of the documents being mislaid..
In the parliamentary questions Blackwood defended the decision not publish. “Given that this national incident is currently subject to an investigation by both the NAO and the ICO, it is not appropriate to publish related documents until these investigations have concluded,” she said.
NHS data loss scandal has prompted five inquiries, ministers say
