London Ambulance Service has suffered seven hours of
unplanned downtime on its 999 call management system since a
software upgrade one month ago.
A spokesman for the service said a database software upgrade on
29 July 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 paper-based processes.
Although the problems have largely been resolved, a spokesman
admitted there were still periods of poor performance for up to 20
minutes.
"During the downtime we can revert to taking information on
calls using pen and paper and revert to a manual system to assess
priority, which can be more time-consuming," he said.
The London Ambulance Service has had IT problems in the past. In
1992, a succession of glitches following the introduction of a
computer-aided dispatch system led to delays of up to three hours
in ambulances reaching emergencies.
Following the 2005 London terrorist bombings, the service had to
revert from mobile phones to pager technology due to the lack of
capacity on the cellular network.
Daniel Dresner, research manager at the National Computing
Centre, said, "People should not underestimate the amount of
testing needed." Where a new application is safety-critical, a very
good regime is needed to assess risk and review results, he
added.
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