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- Susan Johnson, 62, said she went for a hospital appointment only to be told she was dead.
- Hospital records said she’d died four months earlier.
- Johnson still doesn’t know how or why the mistake, now corrected, happened.
A woman reportedly learned she had been registered as dead when she went for a hospital appointment.
Susan Johnson, 62, went into Bridlington Hospital in Yorkshire, England, for a scan in March 2023. But when she arrived, staff told her that records showed she had been dead for four months, the BBC reported.
“I gave them my letter, and their first words were, ‘Ooh, you’re dead.’ I said, ‘pardon?’ I was in shock,” said Johnson.
The staff entered some details onto the computer so she could still receive the scan, but the experience left her “shaking like a leaf,” Johnson told the BBC.
She contacted her primary-care doctors, Scarborough Medical Group, who told the BBC the mistake had been fixed.
However, when Johnson called the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the UK government department responsible for welfare payments, the call handler told her, “On the computer, you’re dead,” she recalled.
NHS England told Business Insider it was “aware of an issue involving a civil death registration being incorrectly recorded against a patient’s medical record.”
In a statement, it said: “This was removed within 24 hours of it being reported to us in March 2023 and the patient was re-registered by their GP. We would encourage the patient to contact us directly so we can explain further.”
But NHS England would not have notified another government department, such as the DWP, of a death.
Scarborough Medical Group had not responded to a request for comment from Business Insider when this article went live.
Johnson still does not know how she came to be registered as dead.
“I need to find out why it happened, how and by whom, and that person, whoever has pressed a button, shouldn’t be working wherever they are,” she told the BBC.
