The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) has been hit with a
massive computer outage, with 80 NHS Trusts in the North West and
West Midlands unable to access their systems since 10 a.m. local
time on Sunday.
Technical problems in a data center in Maidstone are to blame,
NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) has admitted.
The problem originated with a storage area network fault in a
data center operated by CSC Alliance. CSC operates patient
administration, clinical records and other national program systems
for the North West and West Midlands under a B#973 million (US$1.8
billion) deal signed in December 2003.
"Technical issues following power system interruptions mean that
data held on computers in the central data center for the region
cannot be accessed," said CfH and CSC in a statement. "The nature
of the incident meant that service could not immediately be
provided by the back-up systems, also provided by CSC Alliance. No
data has been lost."
CSC and its subcontractor, Hitachi, are working to restore
access to the system and CSC said some priority systems had begun
to come back online. Seventy-two primary care trusts and eight
acute hospital trusts have been affected. University Hospital in
Birmingham is hoping to have access again by Tuesday afternoon.
The outage has affected controversial new systems for theatre
management and appointment bookings, forcing staff to make
provisional appointments using a paper-based backup system, which
will have to be confirmed once the systems come back online,
creating an administrative backlog. Access to computerized medical
records hasn't been affected.
The multi-billion pound NHS Programme for IT, run by CfH, aims
to link more than 30,000 GPs to nearly 300 hospitals by 2014. The
program includes an online booking system, centralized medical
records and e-prescriptions.
Shadow health minister Stephen O'Brien and Liberal Democrat
health spokesman Steve Webb both called the government to task for
the continued glitches to the system, with Webb calling the
incident "alarming." The British Medical Association called for an
independent audit in order to ward off "complete disaster."
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