The Health Service Executive (HSE) is in complete disarray after it emerged that thousands of people may have had unnecessary procedures done since 2011 due to a computer error.
The error was in the HSE’s national medical imaging storage system and was found last week in a provincial hospital.
Thousands of X-rays, scans and procedures since 2011 may have been affected as a consequence of the computer error.
Effectively, when the scans were archived, the “less than” symbol was omitted. Therefore instead of, for example a less than 10% problem, there was a definite 10% problem.
This would potentially be a major difference to someone’s health outlook.
Some patients possibly received unnecessary treatment as a result of incorrect information.
The HSE are said to be working on finding the extent of the error but it’s understood that it has possibly affected thousands of patients.