Glasgow NHS IT Shocker Postpones Operations

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the largest health board in the UK, is having serious IT issues, leading to the postponement of operations and chemotherapy sessions.

Outpatient appointments have also been hit, whilst delays in calls to the switchboard have also been experienced, thanks to problems with the body’s networks.

NHS IT issues

It attempted to fix the problems throughout the day and night, but today said it not been able to resolve them.

In total, 288 outpatient appointments, four planned inpatient procedures, and 40 chemotherapy treatments have been postponed.

“We have however been able to put in place a fix which we believe will ensure that chemotherapy patients are not affected by the continued IT issue,” the NHS organisation said.

“Unfortunately however there will still be some patients whose planned appointments today will be affected and we are currently in the process of assessing which patients this will impact upon. As soon as this has been identified we will contact the patients direct.

“We are continuing to work to get the system back online as soon as possible and would like to apologise again to those patients who have been inconvenienced.”

A spokesperson could not confirm any more detail on the IT issues, other than they were at the network level.

“It is only when something like this happens that NHS organisations realise the criticality of ‘the boring IT stuff’,” said Gayna Hart, founder and managing director of healthcare system provider Quicksilva.

“The role of IT in healthcare makes an IT failure literally a matter of life and death, and I am wondering what has happened to the usual ‘resort to paper’ workarounds that you would expect in a disaster situation.”

UPDATE: The latest from the NHS body is that it had re-established “a basic level of IT service to enable some of the clinical services affected to resume normally”.  It said over the past 36 hours, 564 patients have had their treatment or appointment postponed.

“Further work will be carried out during the afternoon to ensure that this recovery is sustainable and that full IT functionality is restored.

“The unprecedented IT issue relates to our network and the way staff can connect to some of our clinical and administrative systems.”

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