A hospital trust has asked GPs to review a ‘backlog’ of thousands of discharge summaries which it failed to send on to practices, with some dating back more than a year.
North Cumbria Integrated Care (NCIC) Foundation Trust told Pulse that an ‘intermittent issue’ with the system it uses to communicate with GP practices, which arose from an upgrade in July 2023, resulted in 2,118 documents not being delivered, of which 38 needed GP follow-up.
The trust is currently carrying out ‘harm reviews’ on these 38 cases, and has not yet identified any patient harm.
It apologised to GPs last week for its ‘failure’ to keep them in the loop and its ‘error’ in not reissuing all of the discharge summaries when the fault was first discovered in November.
The LMC is pushing for ‘appropriate funding’ from the trust for GP practices to clinically review the backlog, and also for assurance that ‘all clinical risks and liabilities’ will remain with NCIC.
A letter sent to practices last week, seen by Pulse, said GPs had started receiving ‘historic discharge summaries’ which could ‘potentially’ date back to July 2023. But the trust admitted that it had begun this process without prior warning to GPs.
Despite implementing a ‘daily check process’ to identify and ‘retrospectively’ deal with ‘several weeks-worth’ of failed documents in November, the trust neglected to reissue the discharge summaries to GPs at that point.
Last week’s letter said: ‘NCIC apologise to all practices for the failure to communicate in advance of this backlog of discharge summaries being resent and the error made in not reissuing all of these when the original problem was discovered in November 2024.’
Of the checking process implemented in November, the trust added: ‘We apologise for failing to keep practices updated on the progress with this work.’
A ‘local fix’ is now in place, and the trust assured practices that it has ‘error trapping processes to ensure no delays to information passing’ in the future.
However, practices will now each receive a list of historic documents to review and prioritise, and following a clinical review, they must report any patients who are ‘deemed to have suffered clinical harm’ due to the discharge summary delay.
Lancashire and Cumbria LMCs raised concerns about the backlog and lack of funding following this letter from the trust.
The most recent LMC newsletter said: ‘We are aware that some practices are being pressured to take on this work “for the good of the patient,” but we strongly maintain that general practice cannot continue to absorb the failures of another service without proper resourcing.’
LMC leaders have written to NCIC to demand funding and assurances around clinical liability, as well as a ‘public statement accepting responsibility for this failure’ in order to protect practices from ‘undue blame’.
In the meantime, the LMC advised practices not to take on the additional workload.
North Cumbria LMC executive lead Mikaela George told Pulse that she was not aware of NCIC’s discharge summary failure until last week, and that the LMC has not yet had a response from the trust to its demands.
A spokesperson for NCIC told Pulse that the ‘intermittent issue’ it identified meant that ‘whilst most correspondence’ from its emergency department was distributed correctly, ‘a proportion were not’.
They continued: ‘We put in place measures to stop this happening again, and were able to identify the extent of the issue.
‘We found 2118 cases involving patient information which should have been added to GP systems, of which 38 may have involved some follow up by GPs.
‘The Trust have communicated with all GP practices, sending all identified documents to them for information purposes.’
A Pulse investigation last year identified ‘missing letters’ as a national issue, with hospital trusts across the country having failed to deliver at least 724,000 patient letters to GPs, in several almost identical incidents.
In November, it emerged that GPs in Kent had been asked to go through 9,000 hospital letters that were delayed by three weeks, to check for urgent patient actions.
