But so far no response to local outrage over proposed A&E closures
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has issued a statement following the discovery of "data reporting" issues resulted in incomplete records for patients who should have been referred for urgent tests within two weeks.
The NHS Trust, which includes Charing Cross and Hammersmith Hospitals, was forced to write to GPs to ask for their help in tracking down patients urgently referred for cancer tests, after it was revealed that records detailing whether 1,023 such patients still required treatment were incomplete.
An independent investigation into the trust is now looking at the circumstances surrounding 25 patients' deaths to assess if they were related to the recording errors.
And this week, Hammersmith MP Andy Slaughter asked for further measures, including Government action, over what he called the "West London NHS crisis". He said: " The poor management and lack of scrutiny of west London’s NHS health services cannot be allowed to continue."
Imperial College Healthcare said: " We would like to reassure patients that anyone affected by these data issues would have already been contacted directly by us or their GP.
"We would like to stress that there is no evidence so far of our Trust missing any cancer diagnoses or that patients have come to clinical harm as a result of our poor record keeping.
"These issues are to do with how we input our patient data, not about patient care. Our patients’ safety has been our absolute priority while we have addressed issues in the way we record our data.
"We are carrying out a thorough clinical review of records of patients that were referred to us for suspected cancer where we had not recorded that the patients had been seen and, where appropriate, treated.
"To date we have found no evidence that these patients have come to clinical harm as a result of our poor record keeping. 15 patients have been re referred and to date none have been found to have cancer.
" 74 patients have been found to have died before we had checked their records and again to date an independent clinical review group has found that there is no correlation between the reason for death and this data reporting issue.
" We are extremely sorry that this situation was not identified and resolved earlier however, we would like to reassure our patients that this was an issue of poor record keeping, not clinical care."
The medical journal Pulse reports that all GPs in London have now been asked to review all their referrals of patients with suspected cancer over the last six months, and to ensure a system is set up to keep track of these referrals in future.
July 13, 2012