More than 9,000 letters to GPs delayed in Kent owing to IT glitch

More than 9,000 automatic letters to GPs in Kent were delayed by up to three weeks owing to an error which occurred during an IT upgrade at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust.

The delayed letters, dated 31 October 2024, from community-based health teams in the trust, included up to 900 which have been identified as requiring urgent follow-ups.

Pauline Butterworth, deputy chief executive and chief operating officer at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, told Digital Health News: “We would like to apologise to our patients and GP colleagues for any inconvenience the IT issue has caused.

“No patient harm has been identified as a result of the IT glitch, which caused a delay in letters being sent to GP surgeries.

“The number of letters across the three weeks was 9,325. Of these, fewer than 900 were immediately identified as needing urgent follow-up.

“Our services have been working through these letters as a priority and many had already emailed practices directly if they had an urgent request for their patient.

“This only affected letters sent to practices, it did not affect letters sent to patients, many of whom advocate on their own behalf by contacting their GP.”

Pulse reported that GPs in Kent were asked to go through the letters to identify crucial information and urgent patient actions, such as medication reviews and verifications of death.

In a message to practices, the trust said: “This could mean that information you have received about some of your patients may not be in line with the current progress of their care or health needs.

“This could also mean you receive a higher number of letters than you would usually expect from us in one day.

“While there was a delay in sending the letters, they will all be correctly dated to the day the clinician originally generated them.

“Please check any letters received from Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust on Tuesday, 29 October for urgent information, such as urgent requests, medication reviews and verifications of death.”

The IT issue follows an EMIS outage on 4 November 2024, which caused “chaos” for GPs in England when access was cut off to appointment booking systems and patient records at the busiest time of the week.

Meanwhile, in a prevention of future deaths report, published on 23 August 2024, a coroner warned the Department of Health and Social Care and SSP Health to take action to improve GP electronic triage systems, following the death of a patient after an email from his GP practice was not responded to for three days.

In July 2024, the Health Services Safety Investigations Body published a report on its investigation, which found that patient safety incidents relating to the use of online consultation tools by GPs have been underreported.

This story was amended at 18.00 on 12 November 2024 to replace ‘hospitals’ with ‘letters from ‘community-based health teams’.