Hospitals are still continuing to look to India to type up medical notes, despite fears that patients’ safety could be at risk through mistyping or misinterpretation.
The Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital is the latest to outsource thousands of patient letters to India on a two-month trial, and 214 medical secretaries naturally fear for their jobs.
Digitally recorded notes will be sent electronically overseas for typing, despite previous errors picked up from other hospitals which have done the same, such as “phlebitis” mistakenly transcribed as “flea bites”, “below knee” interpreted as “baloney cast” and “hypertension” (high blood pressure) recorded as “hypotension” (low blood pressure).
There are also concerns about this happening at Stevenage.
This type of service will be flawed and not instill public confidence. If it is being done to save money, they should consider the real price – and possible consequences – that could result from errors.
It would be interesting to know what the error rate is for medical notes typed up in the UK.
The accuracy figure the hopsital is looking for is 98.5%, I imagine the UK figure is above that as it has never been questioned to my knowledge.
Let’s hope the 1.5% error is not life-threanting.
Thanks for that. A company I freelance for attempted a bit of outsourcing to India and it has been an unmitigated disaster.
No wonder our health service is in the state it is. I’m sure we’ve all experienced trying to talk about our bank account in detail only to find we’re talking to someone in Delhi that’s never even heard of Suffolk! Let’s get back to basics with our call centres etc for everyone here’s sake.
Remind me not to get ill in my home town. Imagine them trying to transcribe my address – it’s bad enough when English people try to interpret it. Thus far there have been three seperate occasions when people got it wrong – *ALL* of which were in *WRITTEN* communications! One of them had my road name, town and postcode all wrong and another substituted “France” for “Switzerland”.
I had no idea this was happening but I think it’s very worrying.
I saw this story myself (I also live in East Anglia) and was mystified as to why the letters need to be “typed”. Surely everyone does, however senior, their own “typing” these days?
Does this means some doctors are still using dictaphones? If so (and that seems extraordinary), surely they check their letters before they go out- that is the first principle of good office practice.
Barbara, I have a friend who is a medical secretary at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the notes she types up are from a doctor’s dictaphone. She thinks her job might be at risk too as there is also talk of them sending sending medical notes to India too.
I was wondering if India ever reciprocated and sent similar work to us here?
Dear Ellee
I’m a bit shocked about the dictaphones at Addenbrooke’s!
The docs at my GP practice (in N Essex) have PCs on their desks and write up their notes while you are with them. A nice touch is that the screen is angled so you can see what they are writing- though I sometimes wonder whether they add a bit after the patients have left! Doctors used to use naughty acronyms like “NFN” (normal for Norfolk) but I assume this won’t survive outsourcing!
How about the NHS gets with the times?
Most organisations collect data at source because it’s cheaper and more accurate.
Beyond cheques in banks and application forms, I can’t think of much work that goes on now that’s done with data entry later. Phone your insurance company or your bank. Almost nothing goes on paper now. They know who you are and your history. I’m asked the same questions at hospitals again and again, when it should be printed out for me to check.
The NHS is run by a government of fools. People with no scientific base, no experience in running any sort of information systems, no idea of effective organisational structures and with no experience in being customer-facing (except for John Prescott being a steward on the QE2).