Union warns of risks from outsourcing medical records

Patients’ lives are being put at risk by the outsourcing of medical records by hospital trusts, delegates to the UNISON health service union’s annual conference heard last month.

Hospitals in the Midlands, Hull, the South West, London and the South East are sending tens of thousands of confidential patient records to be transcribed in South Africa, the Philippines and India.

Overseas workers are paid to transcribe NHS doctors’ dictations, but do not have the benefit of supporting medical notes, letters and prescriptions against which to check the accuracy of their transcriptions.

UNISON says it now has “significant” anecdotal evidence of potentially life-threatening mistakes made by the transcribers — such as include confusing “hypertension” (high blood pressure) with “hypotension” (low blood pressure), “a septic” (infected) with “aseptic” (not infected) and mixing up “15mg” and “50mg” drug dosages.

The cost-cutting scheme also means job losses for medical secretaries in this country. The East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust has issued redundancy notices to its 160 medical secretaries. But the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust dropped its plan to outsource to the Philippines following protests from UNISON.

UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis described the practice as “dangerous” and “beyond belief”. He said that NHS medical secretaries work to 99.8% accuracy targets, “and once phased out their knowledge and expertise will be lost forever.”

Prentis declared: “The government needs to rethink this off-the-wall idea.”