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Non-technical Description
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An A Revalidation Admin drew our attention to some data that did not appear to be correct. In early October, we corrected how we handle whether a doctor is “under notice” for revalidation. As we only receive partial information from the GMC, we removed stale and potentially incorrect data from a number of records and proactively remove unreliable data as we get some information. One of our services relied on always maintaining knowledge of whether or not a doctor was “under notice”, which was no longer possible so it failed to keep those doctors records updated.
This meant for a small number of doctors *** who were connected to a NHS E designated body outside of TIS Revalidation but after 5th October did not appear so until Friday 3rd November, the first sync after releasing a fix. While investigating the problem on 2nd November, we came across an intermittent issue loading pages. This was resolved in part initially and fully within 3 hours of being noticed by the team and within 2 hours of being apparent to reported by users.
… e.g. what are we doing to fix itHaving addressed the bug, we have identified that there are other places in the code which can be improved in the same way. For the issue of partial failures leading to error messages, we will be putting in place the kind of monitoring that will enable us to detect when there is an issue for 1 user and improve our ability to respond before it becomes a more widespread problem.
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Trigger
Updating under notice
Service Degradation?
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: Change released to correct data and processing for whether doctors are “under notice”.
~00:10 : Logs show that there are approx. 2 “Null Pointer Exception”s that mean we don’t 2 doctors as connected.
: 18:03 User queries connection status - Trainee is showing connected on GMC Connect but not TIS Revalidation.
: 10:47 First responder requested when they were last connected via. GMC Connect?.
: 10:57 Reported that trainee are not even in the connections list on TIS but are on GMC connect - 18/10/2023.
: 11:04 reported that 7562969 another doctor was connected yesterday the day before but remains on the discrepancy list ? is this a different issue to the one listed above?as if they weren’t connected. It initially appeared to be different to the other doctor listed above.
: 11:40 Responder notified that the last time their records in revalidation were updated were the 18/10 & yesterday(1/11/23)
: Unable to manual get doctors for debugging failed: Request was blocked, possibly because of earlier bad requests.
: Manual verification of GMC responses showed 1 doctor was not in the list of connected doctors but the other was.
: Further debugging identified the cause.
: While investing, errors in the Reval app point to another issue: Gateway timeouts some of the time
: Investigation
11:35 : replaced recommendation tasks in production
11:53 : replaced connection tasks in production
12:06 : replaced integration & core tasks in production:
Root Cause(s)
Doctors weren’t appearing as Connected because they were marked as existsInGmc=false and no connected Designated Body but were in GMC Connect as connected.
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