Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust announced a significant data loss affecting maternity records spanning an 11-year period. The incident resulted from human error within the IT department occurring on August 18 during routine technical maintenance operations.
The data loss occurred when staff members were creating a copy of a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes. According to the hospital’s account, a template containing pre-written computer instructions designed for use with a different hospital system was deployed without a critical configuration change being made beforehand. This oversight caused the process to target the maternity database instead of the intended radiotherapy database, resulting in the maternity records database being overwritten. The affected records contained patient information from the hospital’s previous maternity database covering the period from September 2011 to November 2022.
While the hospital successfully recovered patient care-related data including clinical notes, observations, and test results, it was unable to fully restore viewing history records. This means the hospital cannot confirm in most cases whether specific individuals accessed particular maternity records during the affected timeframe. Hospital officials reported escalating the situation immediately upon discovery and engaging external specialists to recover as much information as possible. The hospital stated that no patient information was accessed or used inappropriately as a result of the incident and that current patient care operations were not affected.
Andy Callow, the hospital trust’s chief digital and information officer, apologized for any concern the incident may cause and indicated that the organization completed a patient safety investigation and implemented unspecified measures to strengthen technical controls and prevent similar occurrences. Nottinghamshire Police is investigating whether the data loss relates to a broader inquiry into maternity care incidents at the hospital and whether criminal charges may apply. Police stated that no crime has been identified at present. Nottingham Maternity Family Group, representing some affected families, characterized the data loss as “extremely unnerving” given that families already dealing with previous harm concerns now face additional uncertainty regarding record security.
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