MORE than 20,000 women suffered delays
of up to four years before being restored to
a computerised cervical screening
programme because three health boards
gave a higher priority to protecting the
system against the Millennium Bug.

. . .

The authors of an interim report, which lists
nine recommendations, said yesterday it
may never be known how many women
might have fallen ill or died as a result of the
delay.

The Electronic Herald

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), December 16, 1999

Answers

Spider,

Your link doesn't gZo directly to your quote, but I did a search on "cervical" and from the articles I came across, it looks like they dropped 20k patients from the "call back" list.

This article is regarding Scotland's public health. The women are pissed cause they were not reminded to go in for their free pap smear, which they get once every 5 years.

This oversight was discovered when a woman came in for a pap, was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and they discovered her last pap was in 1989. The Scottish system would have had her also come in for a pap in 1994, but the computer didn't "remind" her, so she didn't think to go. Talk about computers "thinking" for us.....

The glitch was a deletion of names in the "reminders" data base that had not returned in over 5 years. In my field we call these folks "lost to contact".

What is unfortunate is that some women had abnormal results so should have returned within 3 months, but since 5 years had passed and there was no sign of them, they dropped these women as well from the "reminders" list.

clip:

"Health Minister Susan Deacon said she wanted urgent answers after it was revealed that almost 20,000 women had been dropped from recall lists for cervical screening provided to general practitioners."

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 16, 1999.