Thousands sent wrong outcome letters

Almost 5,000 patients at one of England’s highest-performing trusts had their outcome letters sent to the wrong person.

In some cases, the letters were incorrectly posted by Moorfields Eye Hospital Foundation Trust to the wrong GP.

The incident affected letters sent between 25 and 29 April this year, with up to 4,926 patients impacted.

The trust said the cause was a planned configuration change to its integration engine – which handles communication between clinical systems – during a migration from on-premises servers to the cloud.

At the trust’s board meeting on 4 June, chief executive Peter Ridley said some outcome letters were still being processed manually while the trust’s systems were restored.

He said: “Because there has been a data breach, we take that really seriously and we are working through that in a really systematic way.”

The trust said no patient harm had been identified in either incident, and investigations are ongoing.

A spokesperson for the trust said: “We have been open and have written to the patients affected by the data breach to inform them and provide reassurance.

“We have notified the Information Commissioner’s Office and have been responding to their queries.

“We take patient confidentiality very seriously, and we will ensure we take forward any relevant learnings that come out from these investigations.”

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Source: HSJ, 15 June 2026