NHS system mis-books patient appointments

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The NHS' online Choose and Book system has given a couple hundred patients the wrong appointment details since an as-of-yet-undetermined error hit the system on Friday.

The bulk of the confused appointment bookings occurred on Friday, but a spokesperson for the NHS IT group Connecting for Health (CfH) said a handful of patients had been affected in the past 24 hours. He added that the system "seems to be correcting itself".

Affected patients have been contacted to ensure they attend the right appointments, so as far as CfH can tell, none have attended the wrong appointments.

The problem also delayed the system's upgrade. It was supposed to move from 3.6 to Choose and Book 4.0 on Saturday.

"We're still getting to the bottom of what exactly the problem was," the CfH spokesperson told IT PRO, adding that as soon as the issue is resolved, the new release will be rolled out. He added that the programme is still running on the current release, and that Choose and Book was working with their principal supplier Atos Origin to fix the problem. "

The new release would have allowed patients to use Choose and Book to access the Free Choice system - which lets patients pick where and from whom they will receive treatment - electronically outside of their local region.

Patients can still access Free Choice to book local appointments or choose their hospital for treatment, but if they want to go out of their home city, they will need to do it with a paper letter from their GP.

CfH stressed that there was no evidence of patient confidentiality being breached. "From the evidence we have available to us today we believe that patient confidentiality has not been breached. We are monitoring this extremely closely," it said in a statement.

The CfH spokesperson added that the system handles some 116,000 referrals each week, booking meetings between patients and specialists and other medical professionals.

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