In brief: More than 300 documentation incidents, including lost and missing patient records and absent test results, have been logged by Jersey’s Health Department since January 2021. The figures emerged following a freedom-of-information request and cover a period of nearly six years. All incidents were classified as causing either no harm or low harm, and none triggered a formal data breach notification.
What the figures actually show
The Jersey Evening Post reports that the Health Department’s figures, published following a freedom-of-information request, cover January 2021 to August 2026 and record a total of more than 300 documentation incidents. The breakdown makes for uncomfortable reading. Thirteen incidents were categorised as “records believed lost”, 36 as “records missing” and 18 as “records deleted/missing”. A further 17 involved missing test results or reports, five were recorded as “unable to locate record” and two concerned records not being traced correctly.
The single largest category, accounting for 195 of the 286 incidents logged, is described as “missing, inadequate or illegible care record”. The Health Department was at pains to point out that this broader category covers a range of documentation problems and should not be read solely as a tally of missing records. That is a fair clarification, though it does rather raise the question of what else it covers, and whether the answer is reassuring.
The department manages approximately 120,000 physical medical record files. It explained that records can become temporarily unavailable when their movements have not been correctly completed or updated on its electronic patient record system, meaning a file reported as missing may subsequently turn up. Its figures, it stressed, capture incidents “irrespective of subsequent location and/or the transience of their unavailability”.
The gaps in the data
Here is where things get a little frustrating. When asked to distinguish between records permanently lost and those recovered after a delay, the Health Department said the outcome of each incident could not be extracted directly from its reporting system. Doing so would require a manual review of individual investigations, which it said would exceed the statutory time limit under freedom-of-information rules.
In other words, the public knows how many times something went wrong, but not how many times it was actually put right. That is a meaningful gap. A record temporarily misfiled and recovered within hours is a very different matter from one that has vanished permanently, yet the figures as published treat both the same way.
On the question of patient harm, all incidents were classified as involving either “no harm” or “low harm”, with those assessments relating specifically to physical harm. None constituted a data breach requiring notification to the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner. One complaint relating to missing or misplaced records was recorded between June 2025 and August 2026.
Context and accountability
It is worth noting that the Health Department’s willingness to log and publish these incidents at all reflects a reporting culture that, in principle, is exactly what you want in a healthcare system. Incidents that go unreported are incidents that cannot be investigated or improved upon. The fact that 300-plus documentation problems have been recorded over nearly six years across a service managing 120,000 physical files is not, on its face, evidence of systemic collapse.
That said, the inability, or unwillingness, to provide a cleaner breakdown of outcomes is a legitimate concern. Jersey taxpayers fund this service, and patients whose records have been involved in these incidents deserve to know whether their files were recovered or are genuinely gone. The freedom-of-information process exists precisely to enable that kind of accountability, and citing the statutory time limit as a reason not to conduct a manual review, while technically permissible, does little to inspire confidence.
The Government of Jersey has invested considerably in digital health infrastructure in recent years. Whether that investment has yet translated into a more robust system for tracking physical record movements is a question the figures alone cannot answer.
Source: Jersey Evening Post
