NHS sent sensitive child protection reports to a supermarket amid GP mail mixup

'What is clear from this investigation is the inability of both NHS England and Capita to get to grips with a problem they have now known about for years'

Sensitive documents clinical information relating to children's welfare were sent to a nearby supermarket (Getty/iStock)

NHS England sent sensitive reports detailing the welfare and safety of vulnerable children to a supermarket as it tried to resolve a long-running fiasco with the NHS’s internal mail service, auditors have warned.

Child protection reports for three children intended for their GP were sent in an envelope without the practice’s full address and delivered to a supermarket in the same postcode.

The blunder was revealed in a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which has been investigating the errors in the health service’s handling of sensitive patient information.

More than 1,800 high-priority items, such as urgent test results, have been identified by NHS England so far, from a much larger backlog which occurred after a “small proportion” of GPs continued to send letters to a defunct mail redirection service.

GPs should have returned any incorrectly addressed mail – including clinical papers, child protection notes, treatment plans and changes to patients’ medication regimes – to the original sender when the intended recipient has moved to another practice.

A backlog of 580,000 “clinical notes” was amassed under the watch of struggling outsourcing firm Capita, which the company admitted with hindsight it could have reported sooner.

The NAO said the issue was not formally reported to NHS England for 18 months and it will cost an extra £2.4m to tackle the backlog.

​NHS England had begun returning mail to GP practices when it caused the inadvertent breach of data protection.

The NAO report states the redirection was paused following “an incident in which NHS England sent clinical correspondence containing the child protection notes of three children to a practice without showing the name of the practice in the address".

“The package was delivered to a supermarket with the same postcode, which then passed the package to the practice.”

It reported the breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and was told no further action was required, but this triggered a more forensic look at the issue by NHS managers.

To date 25,361 low-priority items have been identified for GPs to review by March, in addition to 1,811 high-priority test or screening results.

Chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) GP committee Dr Richard Vautrey said there had been far ranging issues with all manner of services outsourced to Capita by NHS England – which has led to calls for an enquiry.

“It’s no surprise that with the now longstanding confusion, chaos and failures of these support services for general practice, that a small number of practices may have, in good faith, sent on misdirected correspondence.

“What is clear from this investigation is the inability of both NHS England and Capita to get to grips with a problem they have now known about for years.

“Capita itself admitted it failed to officially disclose the scale of the backlog to NHS England in good time, and both are yet to decide whose responsibility it is to return records to the right practice."

The value of Capita shares almost halved this week following a warning that profits would be 30 per cent lower than expected, and an admission that it had “spread itself too widely”.

NHS England refused to comment on the child protection mailing error, but played down the seriousness of the fiasco. A spokesperson said: “The key fact is that there is no evidence that any patient has been harmed by this, and by March every piece of correspondence will have been reviewed and refiled by GPs and the relevant NHS archive.”

Additional reporting by PA