IQ Solutions

BBC News - Nurse loses job over crime error

It appears that the Criminal Records Bureau in the UK has made yet another mistake relating to personal identity.

Kerry Woolley was hoping to be accepted for a nursing role with University Hospital Birmingham when she failed a recruitment check.It transpires that her identity was mistaken for someone who had various convictions and would have been unsuitable for the nursing position, as a result she failed the recruitment process.Clearly things have not improved significantly since last May when a similar case was made public: Criminal records mix-up uncovered.

In that earlier report Alan Johnson claimed that “only 0.03% of the 9,000,000 disclosures the agency made had been wrong, so the issue had to be put into context”.

Using statistics like these are often the same approach that we meet in large corporate organisations who claim that their DQ levels are higher than 90% so they are happy with progress, without really understanding what 90% actually means to the business.

Important lesson here is to focus on the individual not the statistic. This is the same for governments or companies. Listen to your data consumers, they will tell you what poor DQ really means.

0.03% X 9,000,000 = 2,700 very unhappy recipients of poor DQ but more importantly the government stance appears to be that ‘poor data quality is inevitable’.

Does this stance gives some indication that as an organisation the CRB is at a low level of DQ maturity?

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