SA Health is asking South Australians to seek non-urgent healthcare elsewhere than from a hospital after an electrical fault has thrown its electronic medical records system into disarray.
Firefighters were called to a structure fire at the South Australia government's data centre at Glenside at 9:45am on Wednesday.
The state government and SA Health confirmed that an electrical incident has affected some technical services.
SA Health chief executive Dr Robyn Lawrence said staff were using paper reporting and telephone services to manage patients across most hospitals until systems are back online.
"South Australians should always present to hospital in an emergency and for any serious matters, but we also ask people to please consider other options at this time for non-urgent care," she said.
"Our EDs will always give priority to the most-urgent cases."
A staff email by SA Health chief executive Dr Robyn Lawrence, obtained by the ABC, showed that the organisation was experiencing "system-wide issues" to multiple services in metropolitan Adelaide and regional areas.
"An electrical failure event at the state government's data centre has resulted in loss of some power to the cooling systems of the centre, which hosts many of our servers and applications, causing issues with some data systems and connectivity across the network," the email said.
SA Salaried Medical Officers Association chief industrial officer Bernadette Mulholland said she had received reports that Sunrise — SA Health's electronic system for patient records — was not working.
She said that some emails, phone lines and the Teams app have also been behaving poorly.
"Certainly there are some consideration at this time by the local health networks as to whether or not to cancel some of the elective surgeries and the less-urgent outpatient clinics," she said.
"However, they are hopeful that, by tomorrow, the system will be back up and running, but no one can say for sure."
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Foundation SA's chief executive, Elizabeth Dabars, said nurses were struggling with heightened workloads and "less-than-satisfactory" access to patient records.
"Patient flow is also being by affected by restrictions on patient information, including bed availability and other points of care," she said.
In an earlier statement, SA Health said it was "in the process of moving systems and applications over to a data centre at another location".
"Triple Zero operations have not been impacted," they said.
"We are not aware of any adverse clinical outcomes."
The Department of Premier and Cabinet confirmed some of its ICT services have been affected but "no significant adverse outcomes have been identified".
"Mitigation measures have been put in place and power is expected to be restored to the cooling system overnight," executive director and government chief information officer Eva Balan-Vnuk said.
