Patients infected with the highly contagious and potentially fatal MRSA super bug were not isolated at a Buckinghamshire hospital because of computer errors.
Two infected patients were left in wards with other people at Wycombe Hospital for up to a week because of difficulties with the care records service, an integral part of a £12.4bn NHS computer overhaul scheme.
The errors occurred after Buckinghamshire NHS Trust, which runs hospitals in Amersham, Wycombe and Aylesbury, switched to an electronic records system as part of the upgrade of computers that is soon to be implemented at hospitals across the country.
A spokesman for the trust said: “Our infection control team has identified two patients affected by this in the time since the new system was introduced, and whilst that is two patients too many, no further patients have been identified subsequently.”
The MRSA bug has hit the headlines in recent years after becoming widepsread in hospitals.
It is highly contagious and has a death rate of 34 per cent within 30 days of it being contracted.
It is most commonly caught through the respiratory system but can also infect through open wounds.
The Care Records Service is part of a government initiative aimed at ensuring reliable medical records are available on a countrywide database wherever a patient is being treated.
The system for the Buckingham-
shire NHS Trust is supplied by computer companies Fujitsu and Cerner.
On this occasion, however, the system failed to show that the two patients involved were suffering from the deadly super bug.
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