Patients wrongly told they've got cancer in SMS snafu Askern Medical Practice, a general practitioner surgery based in Doncaster, UK, managed to muddle its Christmas holiday message to patients by texting them they'd been diagnosed with "aggressive lung cancer with metastases." The message went out to patients of the medical facility – there are reportedly about 8,000 of them – …
a firing offence.
I don't agree. I've never agreed with the knee-jerk reaction of 'They didn't do what we wanted so fire them' or even 'they made a mistake so fire them'.
Humans learn by failure and by making mistakes. Whoever did this has now learned a valuable lesson (hopefully suitably reinforced by their management team) and is therefore less likely to ever do anything like that again. If you fire them then you're replacing someone who now has valuable experience with someone who has presumably never done anything so bad/stupid before and is thus more blasé about their work.
Worse still you're now creating a culture of 'don't own up to anything because it'll cost you your job' as opposed to 'admit your faults and help everyone learn from them'.
The time to fire someone is when they repeatedly fail to learn from their mistakes or show malicious intent.
There are some terrible plunders which do deserve firing, but beyond that I completely agree with you.
Where I work you're far more likely to get a bad outcome if you lie or cover up what you have done wrong. In IT, not knowing the source of an problem can slow a fix down considerably.
I want more money to go to the NHS, but this is not the kind of problem that is caused by a lack of money. I'm speculating, but think this scenario is at least plausible:
GP practice decides to use its autonomy to independently purchase an SMS management service.
The partners/admin have no idea what this should cost, or what features they actually need, or even who in this sector are vaguely competent/credible. Why would they? Practising medicine, or managing an office, don't include effectively tendering for ICT services as one of their core duties.
Then, a janky excrescence that barely compiles is purchased, and/or staff are inadequately trained in its use. Somehow, a .csv of the entire list of patients is double clicked in the file selector for the "Message Patients" menu item, instead of selecting the "Message this Patient" option.
"We take patient communication, confidentiality and data protection very seriously"
Well, no, you really don't.
Purely conjecture on my part, but I wonder if the person(s) responsible for sending the text message had a template already preloaded with the medical equivalent of "Moscow in flames, missiles headed towards New York, film at eleven" black-humour gag message.
And who would ever think it a good idea to send any kind of sensitive medical information via SMS?
They should have sent "You are going to die, eventually.". At least that would have been the truth.
Then they could also have argued that the new AI confused future events between long-term endings and short term festivities when asked to come up with a good formulation to describe the future.
"This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence."
Well, of course it was.
Except, you know, computers do what they're told and rarely make such mistakes of their own volition. So there's someone responsible behind the scenes, and that person should probably be answerable for it, to explain how this happened and specifically what steps are being taken to "prevent a reoccurrence".
Not living in the UK, is sending something like a diagnosis via SMS common? Of any kind, so that some snafu like this could happen.
All we get here (Australia) is "your results have arrived, please call to set up a (tele-)consultation". Maybe they add an "urgently" when it's something bad. I therefore surmise that it'd be impossible to send out "you have the bubonic plague/gonorrhea/gnats" even by accident: it simply isn't in the list of messages.
No, this is not even remotely common. If my GP wants to speak to me about a diagnosis then they will telephone me, leaving a message to get back to them if I am not available. They *never* use SMS for anything more than appointment reminders and nudges about flu jabs.
Actually, for something like a cancer diagnosis, my GP would not even use the telephone; they would handle it using a face-to-face consultation.
No, and the text wasn't actually telling patients that they had cancer.
The text said something along the lines of 'hey can you do a DS1500 form for the above patient, diagnosis lung cancer with metastases'.
So it seems that some text that was meant to get sent to a doctor got sent to the distribution list instead.
Yes, that's how I read it.
A DS1500 is completed by a medical professional, not the patient. So it's not telling the patient they've got cancer, and if I'd got the message, I would have realised it wasn't intended for me.
*However* - I'm reading this as someone married to a GP, who's used to reading this sort of stuff. I can quite understand the upset this would have caused for a patient receiving it.
In reply to other comments. I regularly get texts from my practice, never with anything confidential, but reminding me of appointments, or to check for results if I've got my NHS app. All very useful.
As others have pointed out - why send out a "Merry Christmas" message anyway? Just a chance for things to go wrong - as has been demonstrated.
"From the forwarded letters at CMP, Dr [name] has asked for you to do a DS1500 for the above patient. Diagnosis - Aggressive lung cancer with metastases."
Yes, if you took time to read it then you might think that the email was meant for the medical staff. However, it was sent to patients, linking them (the sms was sent to them after all) with aggressive cancer, so even thinking the email was sent to you in error doesn't exactly make it good news.
My GP sends texts to say things like "Your results are back - please call or make an appointment online to discuss them", but no actual detail of what the results are. They also send vaccination reminders. They send more saying that the surgery will be closed for staff training than anything else!
I'm cynical.
My guess is that it was a specific message to some patient who had asked to be texted their test results as they didn't want to get "that pone call" over Christmas . The mistake the medical practice made was to send that message to everyone rather than just that patient. Rather than perhaps making matters worse and confessing that they had sent confidential medical information to everyone they pretend it was a "computer error" that occurred when sending out a Christmas greeting to everyone.
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but we don't give a fuck anyway. To inform a patient about, essentially, terminal cancer, by a text message (never mind the mass-sending fuck up) is way to go, quote, unquote:
... Diagnosis - Aggressive lung cancer with metastates. Thanks.
GDPR may not apply. Some GPs (mine included) do send out things like reminders for vaccines via text, and a christmas greeting may be covered by the option the users tick to allow other communications.
I suspect whoever sent this message had nothing but good intentions. But, these ideas, while well meaning, are frequently misguided. I know this from experience, although I didn't do anything this bad.
When I was a first year student, I sent an email to all users wishing them a Merry Christmas and a happy new year, and went off on my break. I stupidly left Delivery and Read receipts on.
When I got back to Uni, my email inbox was full with receipts, and as a result, no one could send anything to me. I cleared my mailbox, which filled instantly with more receipts. I spent the next couple of weeks clearing my inbox (I had > 18,000), but I get a few reminders that not everyone celebrates Xmas. These ranged from polite messages to actual abuse. I was also called in to see the computing lab manager, where I explained what happened and apologised for any inconvenience caused by my mistake.
I have to admit, I wasn't aware at the time that not everyone celebrated Christmas, because all my friends (whatever religion they were) did celebrate some sort of holiday at Christmas, but even ignoring that, I was surprised I got abuse for wishing people happiness. I'm a lot more cynical now.
The mailing list I had used was replaced with mailing lists for the individual courses, and these lists would only accept emails from staff after that.
There's a difference between sending best wishes for what is largely a civic festival, and an implicit assumption that you believe in the same invisible sky faeries that they do. The latter is offensive to many; either because they believe in a different set of invisible sky faeries, or because they thing you do.
I was surprised I got abuse for wishing people happiness. I'm a lot more cynical now.
Some of us don't like unsolicited communications of any kind. Call it introversion, call it being a moany old git but whatever name you give it there's a lot of us around ;)
If my life or property is in danger then by all means tell me. Otherwise - don't talk to me unless I talk to you.
Sorry.
As already pointed out, the message was addressed to a medical professional rather than a patient. I can well understand having a generic template for 'Hey, could you fill out a DS1500 form' but adding the diagnoses details? Highly unlikely that'd be templated because of the potential range of options. Thus, my guess is that someone hand-typed (at least some) of the message.
Then there's the question about who it got sent to. No 'computer error' there: that's down to a human selecting the wrong distribution list. I suggest there's a subtle difference between 'Dr. Smith' and 'Everyone registered at the surgery'
Now we should examine if it's appropriate for a surgery to be sending any kind of Christmas greeting in the first place. Given a proportion of the residents won't celebrate Christmas anyway (and storing things like religious affinity could raise even more questions), one has to ask if it is really appropriate for a surgery to be sending good wishes for any festival. Bet they don't send 'Happy Diwali' ones (insert religion of choice).
On the flip side, I do see why a practice would want to send a generic 'please use the non-emergency 111 phone number rather than visiting A&E [ER for non-Brit readers] at times of high demand' message. Just don't wrap it up in a 'you're all about to die' message because that kind of detracts from the bit you want to get across.
"I suggest there's a subtle difference between 'Dr. Smith' and 'Everyone registered at the surgery'"
But there is less of a difference between "Dr. Pooled List" (a distribution list with all the doctors in the practice) and "Mr. Pooled List" (a distribution list with all the practice's patients). This is how many of the GPs around me have their system set up.
> "Dr. Pooled List" (a distribution list with all the doctors in the practice)
> "Mr. Pooled List" (a distribution list with all the practice's patients).
Even for British, that's begging for trouble. One letter difference between All Insiders and All (known) Outsiders?
I would think "pooled" is implied by:
Doctors
Patients
(But not to mention nurses, doctor assistants, billing clerks.......
I seem to be the only person who is more concerned about the second SMS than the first. Of course the first is awful but you can sort of see why it happens - They have a "contact all patients" system for emergencies, possibly for important administrative matters affecting everyone and selected the wrong message. Awful but just a system SNAFU.
The second displays an insensitivity that required some serious human interaction, with said human failing in the empathy and communications front. "We apologise for the inconvenience" - I think this should be a type 42 error.
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