Hospitals and GP surgeries in the North West of England
have been left without patient administration information following
a datacentre outage in Kent.
From Sunday 30 July, 72 primary care trusts and eight acute
hospital trusts were affected by problems with a storage area
network at a datacentre run by CSC, the IT services group that
services the North West and the West Midlands under the NHS’s
National Programme for IT.
In a statement, Connecting for Health, which runs the NPfIT, and
CSC said, “Technical issues following power system interruptions
mean that data held on computers in the central ‘datacentre’ for
the region cannot be accessed. The nature of the incident meant
that service could not immediately be provided by the back-up
systems, also provided by CSC Alliance. No data has been lost.”
Experts from CSC and its sub-contractor Hitachi were working
round the clock to restore access to data, the statement said.
Hospitals and GP surgeries affected had in the meantime reverted to
manual contingency systems,.
“CfH and CSC regret the inconvenience this incident is causing
and are committed to resolving the issues as soon as possible,” the
statement said.
In December 2003, CSC signed a £973m deal to implement patient
administration systems, clinical records systems and other national
programme applications in the North West and the West Midlands.
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