NHS Trust IT blunder overwrites 11 years of maternity records

Human error sent reused instructions at the wrong database, taking historical access logs with it

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust managed to overwrite a maternity database spanning more than a decade after someone forgot to change a setting in a reused set of computer instructions.

The mishap happened on August 18, when staff carrying out routine technical work to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting used a set of pre-written instructions that had previously been run against another hospital system.

There was just one problem: a setting needed changing first, and nobody changed it. The process ran against the wrong database and overwrote the Trust's old Medway maternity records database, which contained information about women and babies treated between September 2011 and November 2022.

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Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) said the incident was the result of human error and was escalated within minutes of being discovered.

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The good news is that the Trust has managed to recover the clinical information it needs for patient care, including notes, observations, and test results. Current maternity patients and services are also unaffected, and NUH said no patient information was accessed or used inappropriately as a result of the incident.

The bad news is that one part of the database has proved harder to resurrect.

NUH has been unable to completely restore the audit history showing who viewed maternity records during the 11-year period covered by the database. That means the Trust may now be unable, in most cases, to establish whether a particular person looked at a patient's maternity record between September 2011 and November 2022.

The Trust brought in external specialists and went looking through other sources of information to recover as much of the lost data as possible, but the complete access history remains missing.

The Information Commissioner's Office has been notified, as has Nottinghamshire Police, which is assessing whether the loss has any impact on Operation Perth, its investigation into deaths and serious injuries involving mothers and babies at Nottingham City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre.

NUH said it has completed a patient safety incident investigation and strengthened its technical controls and processes to prevent a repeat performance.

Andy Callow, chief digital and information officer at NUH, apologized to affected women and families and said the Trust had taken "immediate action" to investigate and recover the information.

"The information needed to support patient care has been restored and there has been no impact on current maternity services or the care provided to women and babies today," Callow said.

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"However, to date, we have been unable to fully restore the historical record showing who viewed maternity records between September 2011 and November 2022."

There are plenty of elaborate ways for an organization to lose data in 2026. Sometimes, though, all it takes is an old set of instructions, the wrong setting, and someone pressing go. ®