NHS boss reveals loss of further 162 000 pieces of medical correspondence

The loss of more than 700 000 items of NHS clinical correspondence, reported earlier this year,1 has been compounded after officials admitted that a further 162 000 patient files went missing over five years.

The scandal first emerged in March 2016, when it was discovered that hundreds of thousands of files, including test results and diagnoses, were misplaced between 2011 and 2016 before they were delivered to hospitals and GPs in England by NHS Shared Business Services, an agency co-owned by the Department of Health and the IT company Sopra Steria. In June this year a National Audit Office inquiry identified around 1700 cases where patients could have been harmed as a result of the …