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Ambulance service disrupted by upgrade

Thursday 24 August 2006 04:28

London Ambulance service has suffered seven hours of unplanned downtime on its 999 call management system since a software upgrade at the end of July.

A spokesman for the service said that a software upgrade to its database on July 29th caused disruption to the system. The worst incident meant the system was not performing properly for three hours and control centre staff had to resort to a paper-based system.

Although the problems had now largely been resolved, the spokesman said, there were still periods of poor performance for up to 20 minutes. “During the downtime we can revert to taking information on calls on pen and paper and use a manual system to assess priority, which can be more time consuming.”

 The spokesman said the system had been developed in-house.

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