Daragh O Brien has written and presented in the past for the IAIDQ on the topic of how the legal system and information quality management often look at the same issues from a different perspective, ultimately to identify how to address the issues of the cost and risk of poor quality.
This was brought home very starkly this morning in a case from the UK High Court which has opened the possibility of six figure damages being awarded to an 8 year old boy who was orphaned by a data quality error.
A single key stroke error on a computer cost a mother her life from breast cancer and left her eight-year-old son an orphan, the High Court has heard.
Two urgent letters informing the single mother of hospital appointments were sent to the wrong address – because the number of her home was typed as ’16’, instead of ‘1b’.
In a tragic series of events a young mother discovered a lump on her breast. She was treated in hospital and given the all clear, but continued to be concerned. Her GP arranged further tests for her but she never received the letters due to a simple mis-keying of her address which meant she never received her appointment letters. As her cancer went untreated for a further 12 months by the time she was diagnosed her only treatment option was palliative care. Had she been treated in time, the Court heard, she would have had a 92% chance of survival for another 10 years.
Her doctor admitted liability arising from the failure of the surgery to follow up with the the woman on her tests, which might have uncovered that she hadn’t received the letters.
The Court dismissed an argument by the defence that the woman should have followed up herself, on the grounds that, while they would never know what had been in her mind, she had already been given an “all clear” and that she was likely either trying to get on with her life or may have been scared to return to the doctor.
A key lesson to be learned here is that ensuring accurate information is captured at the beginning of a process is critical. Equally critical is the need for organisations where the data is potentially of life and death importance to ensure that there is follow up where the process appears to have stalled (for example if expected test results are not received back from a hospital).
A simple error in data input, and a failure of or lack of error detection processes, has been found by the UK High Court to be the root cause for the death of a young mother and the orphaning of an 8 year old boy. This is a SIGNIFICANT legal precedent.
Also, the case raises Data Protection Act compliance issues for the GP practice as sensitive personal data about a (now deceased) patient was sent to the wrong address.
RELATED POST: Daragh O Brien has a related post on his personal blog from 2009 about how Information Quality is getting some interesting legal support in the English legal system.
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