A “human error” in the IT department led to Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) losing data from maternity records over a 11-year span.
The process used a set of pre-written computer instructions that had before been used for a different hospital system.
The overwritten database held data from NUH’s previous maternity database, which included maternity records for women and babies who received care from NUH from September 2011 to November 2022.
Nottingham Maternity Family Group, a group representing some of the families affected by the broader investigation, said that the data loss reported this week is “extremely unnerving.”
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NUH noted the data loss doesn’t impact current patient care.
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A “human error” in the IT department led to Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) losing data from maternity records over a 11-year span.
The data loss occurred on August 18, the English hospitals announced in a blog post on Monday spotted by The Register.
The process used a set of pre-written computer instructions that had before been used for a different hospital system. A setting that should have been changed before the process was run was missed. As a result, the process was carried out on a maternity database instead of the radiotherapy database, causing the maternity records database to be overwritten.
The overwritten database held data from NUH’s previous maternity database, which included maternity records for women and babies who received care from NUH from September 2011 to November 2022.
NUH has been unable to retrieve some of the data, the blog said:.
The announcement comes as NUH faces a broader police investigation into allegations that over 500 mothers and babies endured “potentially avoidable” harm or died due to systemic failings within NUH, per a review of the hospitals’ maternity department released in June and led by a senior midwife.
“At present, no crime has been identified,” deputy chief constable Rob Griffin, one of the investigation’s leaders, said, per the BBC.
Nottingham Maternity Family Group, a group representing some of the families affected by the broader investigation, said that the data loss reported this week is “extremely unnerving.”
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