GP surgeries expected to be 'particularly busy' after major IT outage last week

Three major hospital systems and one GP system were affected by a major IT outage at the end of last week.

Work to resolve the issue continued across the weekend, the Department of Health said.

Industries across the world were hit by the outage, leading to cancelled flights and problems in some healthcare, retail and banking settings.

In a statement on Sunday evening, the department said they understood the issue was due to a faulty update from a software supplier to a number of health and social care third party technology partners.

They said that no cyber attack is suspected, and added that no core infrastructure or systems were affected.

"We can confirm that three major hospital systems and one GP system were affected: Epic Electronic Care Record, Varian Radiotherapy System, Allocate eRostering System, EMIS GP System," they said.

"The EMIS GP System is also used in the prison healthcare services operated by one of the hospital trusts.

"As well as losing core view and update functionality, a number of system integration components were affected - meaning that other connected services were also adversely impacted (eg orders and results coming to and from the laboratory services).

"Given we are part way through a number of major rollout programmes, these issues affected our five hospital trusts differently.

"The NI Ambulance Service and GP Out of Hours services were unaffected."

The department said that all teams, including affected GP practices, implemented their business continuity plans with a focus on ensuring those clinically urgent patients were managed first.

"The core Epic Electronic Care Record system was back to operational state by around 9am on Friday morning, with integration technologies all resolved by Friday afternoon," they said.

"Endoscopy imaging was the last interface service to be restarted at 6pm.

"The Allocate eRostering system was operational by 10.30am on Friday morning in some trusts, with the latest coming online at 3.30pm on Saturday afternoon. The varian impacts vary across different trusts and a full picture of that system outage is being collated.

"There are numerous 'instances' of our EMIS system and these have been brought back online as our third party partner has worked to apply and test the appropriate corrective actions to each instance.

"Prisons is a 24/7 service and was brought back online at 4.45pm on Saturday.

"The other instances that serve GP practices were also fixed, operational and tested by 21:00 on Saturday evening.

"This means that all GP practices will have core system access for beginning of normal business on Monday, although some non-core interfaces such as Emergency Care Summary and Key Information Summary that do not affect direct patient care may be later in week. Detailed communications are being issued to all affected GP practices for Monday morning.

"It will take some time to ascertain exactly what the operational impact of the outages were, as services recover from Friday's issues. Initial assessments are that there has been minimal impact or cancellation to patient care in hospitals.

"The sorts of impacts that are beginning to be returned include: theatres and scopes continued but delayed start time for radiotherapy clinics and some theatre timing slots, and some issues with respect to staffing over the weekend but these were mitigated and workarounds put in place.

"A more definitive position, including an assessment of the impact on GP practice business on Friday, will be developed in the coming days."

Earlier the British Medical Association urged patience with GP practices at the start of the week as they deal with the repercussions of the IT outage.

They said that Monday is expected to be a particularly busy day for surgeries.

An estimated two thirds of practices in Northern Ireland were impacted by the global IT problems and were forced to revert to paper-based processes in some instances.

Dr Frances O'Hagan, chairwoman of BMA's Northern Ireland general practitioners committee, said Monday will see practices have to deal with the aftermath of the outage.

"A key online system we rely upon to access and update patients' clinical records went down, causing a considerable backlog of work that will now have to dealt with in this coming week," she said.

"This will of course put considerable strain on general practice, however, staff will continue to provide care to the best of their ability.

"Whilst these systems return online, I would appeal to anyone accessing their GP to be patient while staff do their utmost to address this backlog of work.

"To ensure such an outage does not have a similar impact in the future, one that forced many surgeries to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients, we would call for more investment from the Department of Health in contingency planning and recovery plans."