From the #dataquality correspondents on Twitter comes this great story of a classic IQ Trainwreck.
Hilton Plettell is pregnant and is expected to deliver in 7 months, according to the NHS. They’ve invited him to a scan to see his bundle of joy.
Yes. We did say HIM and HIS, because Hilton is a 50 year old department store merchandising manager. But that is not the end of the IQ Trainwreck here.
- The hospital he was directed to is 162 miles from his home (a long way to travel with the full bladder needed for an ultrasound scan).
- A sticker attached to the letter correctly identified Mr Plettell as being Male.
So, 3 errors or inconsistencies in the letter which indicate a Data Quality kerfuffle in the NHS (at least in Norwich).
A spokesperson for the hospital thanked Mr Plettell for raising the issue with them and indicated they were undertaking a Root Cause Analysis to see where their processes and procedures could be improved to prevent this type of obvious error.
We can’t help but wonder if the root cause might be similar to the problem encountered by DataQualityPro.com’s Dylan Jones last year, which we reported here in June 2009.
The story is covered in the Daily Male Mail, which reproduces a picture of Mr Plettell’s hospital letter (but that image is copyright so we can’t republish it here).
Nice find Daragh, great post.
It certainly has a lot of similarities with the case surrounding my son last June (thanks for sharing the link).
The issue we had was incorrect NHS ID allocation and we also received incorrect mail for a child who lived at the other side of the country.
Clearly, the trainwrecks continue.
Whilst the pregnant man story obviously has a comical slant can you imagine how this guy would have felt if the letter had been to inform of some worrying test results that weren’t his?
The whole issue of local hospital ID’s and NHS ID’s is still clearly ongoing, thanks for posting.
Dylan
The comical slant is, I feel, part of the “oh, it’s only data” mindset that Information Quality professionals encounter on a regular basis. I think editors view it the modern equivalent of the old “Family pet on the electoral roll” stories that used to abound around election time.
Of course, it could be a lot more expensive for the NHS hospital if they had sent the actual data for another patient to the wrong address. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner looked into exactly this issue last year and found against an organisation because they had sent paternity test results to the wrong address. Given that the fine in the UK are up to £500,000 (and likely to increase across Europe when the new Directive comes into being in 2011) there is a clear cost of non quality here.
Just a thought… has the Mail missed out on a real news story because they didn’t look at the Data?
Let’s parse the patient name,….
Hilton Plettell… Hilton P…. P. Hilton…. Paris Hilton…
????
Unlikely but no more unlikely than a pregnant man.
I can’t believe a health service made a mistake with a patient’s data. Surely that could never happen in Ireland.
Paul – I was going to mention your personal experience with patient data in Ireland but I thought otherwise as the situation might have moved on since we spoke about it. Please feel free to share as a comment here… it is a very good story