Modbury Hospital

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, how many records of Modbury Hospital patients have had information apparently added by doctors and nurses who have not worked at Modbury Hospital for months, if not years?

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (14:47): It was a technical issue, which made it look like retired doctors saw patients in the Modbury Hospital emergency department, that's now been resolved. To enable doctors at Modbury Hospital to use Oasis to order pathology and radiology reports, an interface between the Modbury Hospital's computer system, IBA, and Oasis, used across public hospitals in South Australia, was put in place in December 2016.

A glitch occurred in the interface, meaning that some doctors' codes were mismatched on the Oasis list for Modbury Hospital. Due to the doctors' codes being mismatched, when staff entered the codes in IBA, the name of an incorrect doctor was recorded in Oasis when the data was transferred from IBA to Oasis for patients treated in the Modbury ED.

All other information regarding treatment, length of stay, test results, etc. was completely unaffected. This was a simple coding error and wasn't in any way a deliberate ploy to suggest the patient was being treated when they weren't. The error did not affect the treatment of any patients or the statistics that were generated about patients' length of stay in Modbury Hospital. The problem has now been resolved, and the data errors have all been corrected. My understanding is the error occurred over a number of months, so I would have to check how many patients were affected.