Thousands of letters to patients sat unclaimed in community mailboxes for a year, NLHS says
"We recognize that many of the letters that were sent out and returned back to us were intended for our patients and the recipients of our services," Tina Edmonds, interim vice-president of quality and learning health systems at NLHS, told CBC News.
"So we acted quickly to ensure patient risk was mitigated."
The health authority relies largely on Canada Post to deliver appointment notices.
Edmonds said NLHS has launched a review process and has made it a priority, given the volume of returned mail and the fact that it was in community mailboxes for an extended period of time.
"As soon as we started receiving mail, programs and services began reviewing the mail in their areas to determine if [there were] any missed appointments or delayed communications or other patient impacts," Edmonds said.
"No patient impact has been identified thus far, and it really seems to be localized mainly in the Eastern-Urban area."
That zone includes the greater St. John's region – Conception Bay South and all communities east of the town, from Witless Bay up to Pouch Cove, except for Bell Island.
Edmonds said NLHS was told by Canada Post last month that the mail was delivered to community mailboxes but not retrieved by the intended recipients. It remained in those mailboxes for over a year because nobody claimed ownership. A "significant quantity" was returned to the health authority on June 12.
"It was a Canada Post issue," Edmonds said. "The root cause of the issue wasn't a systems breakdown within Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services."
In a statement to CBC News, Canada Post cited last fall's labour disruption as a contributing factor.
"We prioritized sending out current mail and parcels to ensure they reached recipients in a timely manner," Canada Post spokesperson Lisa Liu wrote in an email to CBC News.
That resulted in a backlog of return-to-sender (RTS) pieces of mail that had yet to be processed and sent back to the original sender.
According to Canada Post, work is now underway to address the issue.
"To expedite processing, we have implemented additional capacity enhancements that have resulted in bulk volumes being returned to the original sender," Liu wrote.
"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank customers for their patience and understanding as we continue to work through processing RTS mail."
Items are returned to sender if the address doesn't contain enough information, for example, or if the person receiving it has moved without providing a forwarding address.
According to Edmonds, NLHS acknowledges this situation is an opportunity for "systems improvement."
She stressed the importance of patients updating their contact information with NLHS, and said there is also a number for people to call if they have concerns they may have missed an appointment.
To update your patient contact information with NLHS, call 1-877-336-4170. You need your MCP card when you call.
For patient and family concerns, call the patient relations office at 1-877-444-1399.
Edmonds said NLHS has a new health system scheduled to go online next April, which will allow people to log on and update their information there. That has the potential to significantly reduce the issue of returned mail.
And the new system will also have "some functionality in terms of appointment scheduling."
Some programs — such as medical imaging — currently have automated reminder systems in place.
But generally, appointment notices continue to go out by mail.
NLHS sends 2.5 million pieces of mail per year. Officials could not immediately provide a breakdown on how much of that would be appointment notices.
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