[tweetiepooh]

When I worked at a hospital there was a charity linked to us that collected monies for us to help get expensive new equipment and run things not always covered by the NHS coffers.

When a patient was discharged their postal details were passed to the charity so they could mail the patient (unless requested otherwise) explaining who they were and asking for money. Actually it probably was more like a remember us in you will type of thing.

Nothing wrong with this, many do it. Trouble was that the system didn't check the reason for discharge so sent mail to people who had died in the hospital. One of my jobs was to modify the process so people who had this code in the discharge reason did not have their details forwarded.

Hey if we could do this in 1990 it should be easy in today's systems excepting they don't write their own systems anymore, they buy them in and the vendor then wants huge amounts to change the system and really long lead times.