The NHS's new data spine, a backbone of the national
programme for IT (NPfIT), was down for 1,680 minutes, or 28 hours,
in the week ending 1 January.
Doctors and IT staff said there were continuing difficulties
logging into national systems through the spine.
The data spine is described by Connecting for Health, which runs
the NPfIT, as a core building block of the NHS Care Records
Service. The service is being designed to hold records on 50
million patients. It is also used as part of the electronic version
of Choose and Book, which allows patients and doctors to pre-book
hospital appointments online.
Doctors' representatives said the downtime would add to the
concerns of clinicians about the performance of new national
systems, and to what extent they will wish to rely on centralised
and regional equipment. The latest outages are said by some doctors
to have left them unable to carry out their normal work.
Connecting for Health said there were "ongoing problems around
the Spine Patient Demographics Service [PDS]". This contains
details of a patient's NHS number, name, address and date of birth.
The problems are "resulting in users experiencing periods of
downtime or very slow performance".
The spine holds demographic information and summarised clinical
information such as allergies, emergency hospital visits and
adverse reactions to drugs. It is also used to provide an interface
between local and NPfIT systems. It is run by BT.
Connecting for Health said the problems were also affecting
other services, including those offered by local service providers
that are "spine-enabled".
"Details about the service downtime and response times are being
clarified with BT Spine [the contractor]," said Connecting for
Health.
Despite the 28 hours outage, Connecting for Health has reported
on its website that the overall level of spine availability for the
week ending 1 January was 95.8%.
"The availability/downtime figures here are currently the most
accurate assessment possible and do not reflect the severely
degraded response times experienced by users," it said.
In a statement, the organisation said, "NHS Connecting for
Health can confirm that some of the NHS organisations using our
systems and services have been experiencing some intermittent
interruptions with one part of the spine service, with slow
response times when accessing PDS.
"NHS Connecting for Health is working together with suppliers to
address the issues which have surfaced, and by yesterday [5
January] a near normal service has been operating."
Worthwhile goals, debateable progress >>