Another IT crash in the north

A component failure at a hospital has led to delayed appointments, the latest  in a spate of IT crashes at NHS trusts.

Royal Preston Hospital first reported the failure at 2pm on Thursday, and remained down until 11pm that evening.

Part of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the outage did not spread to any of its other sites.

A spokesperson for the trust did not give more details on the “component failure”, but said on Tuesday that systems were all now up and running.

She confirmed it was not a cyber-attack, and said some outpatient appointments from Thursday had to be rescheduled. However, patient’s safety was not affected, she said.  

In a statement on Friday the trust said the IT team had been “working through the night to test our systems and get everything back up and running”.

The statement described the issue as a “component malfunction” and that “tried and tested contingency plans” were implemented to maintain services. The trust was still undertaking root analysis to determine exactly which component failed.

Recently there has been spate of IT crashes bringing down hospitals and trusts in the north of the country.  

One of the more high profile incidents was Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust’s four day outage in November where nearly 3,000 patient appointments were cancelled. The trust confirmed on Monday that ransomware was behind the attack. 

In September, a hardware failure at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust led to crash of its pathology system. Two months on, the trust was still relying on paper and phones for parts of its service.

St George’s University Hospitals and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS foundation trusts have also both experienced serious IT outages in the past six months.

According to Digital Health Intelligence, Lancashire uses QuadraMed Clinical Patient Record for its electronic patient record and its patient administration system.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals latest draft sustainability and transformation plan, published in recent board papers, refers to electronic record sharing across area as one of its key themes to achieve its paperless goal.

Preston has 700 beds and is part of one of the largest trusts in the country.

Lancashire Teaching provides district general services to 370,000 people in Preston and Chorley, and specialist care for 1.5 million people across Lancashire and South Cumbria.

Digital Health Intelligence: holds information on the clinical systems installed at trusts across the UK and uses this to calculate a Clinical Digital Maturity Index score. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ranks 1 out of 153, with a score of 95. (requires log-in).