NHS trust loses 11 years of maternity record audit logs due to IT error
Original: IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records
Why This Matters
Audit log loss at a hospital under active police investigation raises serious accountability concerns.
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust announced on September 22 that a human error on August 18 caused its maternity records database to be overwritten, erasing 11 years of access logs covering September 2011 to November 2022. Patient care data was recovered, but record-viewing histories could not be restored.
The incident began during routine IT work: a technician was copying a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes, using a pre-written script previously built for a different system. A configuration setting was never updated, so the script ran against the maternity database instead — overwriting 11 years of records.
NUH says it escalated internally within minutes, then brought in external specialists. The result: patient care data — notes, observations, test results — was recovered. What's gone is the audit trail showing who accessed those records between September 2011 and November 2022. In plain terms, the hospital can no longer verify whether any given person viewed a patient's maternity file during that period.
Chief Digital and Information Officer Andy Callow stated that a patient safety incident investigation has been completed and that unspecified controls have been strengthened. "I am sorry for the concern and distress this incident may cause to women and families affected," he said.
The timing is particularly uncomfortable. NUH is currently under a broader police investigation following a June review led by a senior midwife, which found that over 500 mothers and babies may have experienced avoidable harm or death due to systemic failures including understaffing and failures to act on parental concerns. The loss of who-viewed-what logs makes any accountability investigation significantly harder.