15 September 2022: Missing Medical Records (Presentation) - C

The final sub-topic of the third theme is simply “missing” records. This often involves patients seeking to obtain their records, but the NHS cannot provide them and cannot explain why not. The topic also includes incidents of specific items or sections of peoples’ medical records being missing. The suspicion is that some contents have been removed for whatever reason.

There is the wider suspicion that there has been a systemic filleting of (“interference with”) peoples’ medical records across the board, for example blood product batch numbers. A few examples of people seeing their records and shortly thereafter seeing them again and somehow between the two occasions noticing how parts of the records which had been there at the first time of seeing them were not there at the second viewing (including a handwritten note describing a patient’s parent as a “neurotic mother”). There are examples of specific blood transfusions happening, but no record remained of it ever happening either in the file or the nurses record. Prof Ludlum was specifically accused of having separate sets of notes on certain patients. It was mentioned that it was not possible for the Inquiry to investigate so many individual incidents. However, the weight of evidence from so many witnesses covering similar types of information and similar dates does allow the Chair to draw conclusions.

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