Website FAQ

‘Browse’ enables the user to look through disclosed material that has been selected and grouped in particular ways.

Each disclosed item has been given a unique ID and certain information about it has been captured, including:

• who contributed it

• when it was created (if known)

• whether or not it is referred to in the Report 

• whether it mentions any of the people whose names occur frequently in the Report*

• whether it mentions any of the organisations whose names occur frequently in the Report*

• whether it includes the names of any patients.*

The browsing method you choose will present materials that have been selected and grouped according to one of these criteria.

* Further notes

For the browsing methods indicated with an asterisk above, we have identified which documents reference patients who died, organisations and people by searching within:

• the title and description of disclosed material

• the content of the documents.

To make the content of the documents searchable, we have used optical character recognition (OCR) software to ‘read’ the scanned image and create a text version.

OCR software is not perfect and will not always recognise words correctly, particularly if the original is handwritten, faint, creased or stained. For these reasons some documents will not be found by these browsing methods, unless the name in question is in the title and/or description.

For ‘search by the name of a patient’, please be aware that the software may identify a document as referring to one individual, when in fact the reference is to somebody else with a similar name. This is most likely to happen when only the surname and first initial are present, and least likely to happen when there are multiple initials, or when forenames are expressed in full.