A senior clinician at an east London NHS trust has told LBC patients have already come to harm because of serious failures linked to a new electronic patient record system — including one case where a patient is said to have died after a referral was missed.
The whistleblower, who works at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and asked not to be named, alleged a patient with Covid, who also had cancer, died while waiting for a haematology referral after the request was not received by the department.
The clinician said the problems have left staff “in tears”, caused missed referrals, delayed diagnoses, and created what they described as “chaos” across the organisation.
They told LBC they were speaking out because they were “very, very worried for patient safety”.
“It’s keeping me up at night,” they said. “We can’t deliver the service we want to for our patients, and I feel that we’re not being heard.”
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The senior clinician, who has worked in the NHS for several decades, said serious issues emerged after the Trust rolled out its electronic patient record system late last year.
They alleged referrals were not always reaching the right teams, staff were struggling with missing or unreliable patient information, and serious findings were not always being escalated properly.
“I think we...
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