GPs asked to report patient harm after trust failed to send over 14k discharge letters
A hospital trust has failed to send over 14,000 discharge letters to GPs due to ‘a failure’ in the process, Pulse has learnt.
University Hospitals of Leicester (UHL) told Pulse it discovered that 14,443 discharge letters were not digitally sent to GP practices between March 2023 and March 2024.
The trust said that an audit of a ‘random selection’ of 120 patient records covering the period has been conducted to ‘check for any potential patient harm’.
GPs were not asked to go through the backlog but they were asked to contact the trust if they have ‘any concerns’ that patients have ‘come to harm as a result’ of the practice not receiving a hospital letter during the affected period.
GPs with concerns have been sent information on how to get in touch with the trust, UHL said.
This is the latest in a series of similar incidents uncovered by Pulse during the past two years, which led to chaos for GP practices having to deal with backlogs and to anxiety for patients whose clinical information could have been missed.
Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) LMC chief executive officer Dr Grant Ingrams said that the LMC and the trust agreed that the additional workload of having to check thousands of letters ‘would be disproportionate for practices’.
He said: ‘For example, it would not just be reconciliation of medication, but the practice would then need to look through every clinical interaction since the date of discharge (within and external to the practice) to check if there had been any subsequent changes.’
He said that the backlog ‘could cause some issues with patients’, mainly because the practice would not have received a final message to say why a patient had been in hospital.
Source: Pulse, 26 September 2025
