Hemel explosion hits Northgate hospital customers

Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals, London, were was working on paper this week after the company that manages their hosted patient administration services suffered serious damage in Sunday’s explosion in Hemel Hempstead (below).

It is understood that a total of five hospitals use Northgate’s services and that they have reverted to paper systems pending restoration of their services.

A spokesperson for Addenbrooke’s said the explosion had knocked out the hospital’s servers on Sunday morning so staff had gone back to paper-based working in accordance with the hospital’s contingency plan.

“Hopefully, we will be getting our systems back by the end of the week,” she said.

The Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust also confirmed that staff had reverted to paper under its contingency plans.

“Our data is secure because it is backed up off-site and Northgate have taken care of that,” said a spokesperson.

Northgate Information Solutions  are software and IT services specialist for the human resource, public service and managed services markets. Its healthcare business was sold to iSoft in 2002.  An iSoft spokesman said: "They [the affected hospitals] were part of the Northgate Healthcare business acquired in 2002, but the hosting arrangements remained in place."

Northgate issued a statement saying that the fabric of its buildings and the fixtures and equipment inside had been badly damaged (above). Back-up systems that were in place have been rendered inoperable.

The company said: “Northgate’s ability to service its customers has therefore been temporarily affected. As a result, its well-developed and previously rehearsed business continuity plan has been initiated. This will allow Northgate to restore its services using remote data centres and other offices that Northgate has around the country.”

Though the back-up systems on the Hertfordshire site were rendered inoperable, an iSOFT spokesperson confirmed that the overwhelming majority of hospital clients’ data is safe at other sites where back-ups are couriered daily. He said that Saturday’s data which was due for collection a very short while after the massive explosion happened remained in a fire safe in the damaged building. 

"Depending on when the site is made safe by authorities a decision will be taken on which set of data to restore from – this is the last step of the recovery process which has seen commendable efforts from Northgate and iSOFT," said the spokesman.

Four Northgate employees were on the site at the time of the explosion nearby at the Buncefield Fuel Depot and, though three were sent to hospital, all have now been discharged.