AI scribes are getting drug names and diagnoses wrong in NHS records

This article was published on August 31, 2026 A patient in England was told they had demyelination, the nerve damage that underlies conditions including multiple sclerosis. The test result had actually read “null demyelination”, and an AI scribe had dropped the word that reversed the meaning. That case appears in a warning from Healthwatch England, the statutory patient watchdog, reported by the Guardian today. Its finding is that the tools now transcribing consultations for GPs and hospital doctors are getting drug names and diagnoses wrong, and that patients are often the ones who notice. Twenty-seven different AI scribes are in use across the health service in England. They sit in the consulting room, listen, and produce the note that goes into the record and the letter that goes to the patient. The errors collected by the watchdog are mundane in form and serious in effect. One scribe swapped a prescribed drug for a different one with a similar name, the kind of confusion that pharmacology spends considerable effort trying to design out. Another summary omitted a consultant’s instruction that the patient should seek a repeat prescription for migraine medication. A third recorded