UK's NHS lost 298,000 Rx records in 10 years

The UK's opposition Conservative party has attacked the government for allegedly losing 298,100 prescription records since the present Labor government took office in May 1997. The paper documents include the names and addresses of patients, as well as their date of birth. According to Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, the records are generally lost in transit from pharmacies to one of the Prescription Pricing Division's regional offices across the country.

The problem affects prescriptions dispensed under the National Health Service but only involves a tiny fraction of the documents, 0.01%, according to Ms Primarolo. It also comes at a time when a number of data thefts from government departments has called into question the security of centrally-collected information by the national authorities.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, which represents pharmacists warned that a move to electronic record, whilst it would reduce some problems, is not an automatic solution to the problem. A spokesman for the group told the UK's public broadcaster, the BBC: "no system would be perfect and there would still have to be a paper back-up somewhere."