One of the NHS’s biggest hospital trusts is facing major problems after its IT system failed because of the extreme temperatures earlier this week.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust (GSTT) in London has had to cancel operations, postpone appointments and divert seriously ill patients to other hospitals in the capital as a result of its IT meltdown.
The situation means that doctors cannot see patients’ medical notes remotely and are having to write down the results of all examinations by hand. They are also unable to remotely access the results of diagnostic tests such as X-rays and CT and MRI scans and are instead having to call the imaging department, which is overloading the department’s telephone lines.
GSTT has declared the problem a “critical site incident”. It has apologised to patients and asked them to bring letters or other paperwork about their condition with them to their appointment to help overcome doctors’ loss of access to their medical history.
Both its datacentres, one at Guy’s hospital and the other at St Thomas’ hospital, stopped working on Tuesday afternoon as Britain experienced record temperatures. The air conditioning units intended to keep them cool failed, sources at the trust said.
As a result, the trust’s 23,500 staff lost access to the clinical applications they use to store and share information about patients’ history and condition.
GSTT confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the problem was unresolved.
It has significantly disrupted the normal functioning of GSTT’s hospitals. For safety reasons, the trust has been forced to divert to other hospitals four types of very unwell patients it was due to admit: those with heart problems, awaiting an organ transplant, with vascular problems and those due to receive potentially life-saving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy.
One doctor at GSTT, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “This is having a major effect. We are back to using paper and can’t see any existing electronic notes. We are needing to triage basic tests like blood tests and scans. There’s no access to results apart from over the phone, and of course the whole hospital is trying to use that line.
“Frankly, it’s a big patient safety issue and we haven’t been told how long it will take to fix. We are on divert for major specialist services such as cardiac, vascular and ECMO.”
GSTT is a regional centre of excellence for several areas of specialist care, including lung problems, critical care and transplants.
The trust has publicly acknowledged, through messages on its Twitter feed, that it has been experiencing problems with its technology but has given few details about the extent of the disruption caused.
Soon after the meltdown first occurred on Tuesday it tweeted: “We are having some problems with our IT and telephone systems”. On Wednesday it said: “We continue to have some problems with our IT and telephone systems, which we are working hard to fix.”
On Thursday it tweeted again to say it was “still working hard to fix problems with our IT systems”.
It gave little detail in any of the tweets about the scale of the disruption. However, in its tweets on Thursday it gave a hint about how services were being affected, apologising to patients who “have had trouble contacting us or had any issues accessing our services”.
It then added: “We are trying to contact anyone whose appointment we need to cancel. If you are visiting us today, please bring any letters or paperwork we have sent you to your appointment, to help us reduce the risk of delays.”
In a statement, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust said: “As a result of the extreme temperatures on Tuesday we have experienced significant disruption to our IT systems, which is having an ongoing impact on our services.
“While the majority of appointments have gone ahead, unfortunately we have had to postpone some operations and appointments and we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
“The trust has well-established business continuity plans to allow us to continue as much activity as possible and to ensure that patient safety is prioritised at all times.
“Our teams are working around the clock to fix these problems as soon as possible.”
