Scottish NHS IT glitch highlights need for disaster recovery

IT meltdown forces a Scottish NHS trust to consider postponing chemotherapy sessions, operations and outpatient appointments

Hundreds of NHS patients in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) area could be set to have today's appointments rescheduled after a "major IT problem" locked staff out of some systems.

Nealy 300 outpatient appointments, four inpatient procedures and 23 day cases have had to be postponed so far after the glitch occurred yesterday morning and is still unresolved.

Forty chemotherapy treatments were expected to be cancelled too, but the trust says a fix it implemented last night will ensure they are not affected by the problem. The trust also said that emergency services were not affected.

NHS GGC said in a statement that "the problem relates to our networks and the way staff can connect to some of our clinical and administrative systems" and insisted it was doing its best to solve the problem.

It did not name its IT provider in its statement, but vendor InterSystems has NHS GGC and a range of other Scottish NHS trusts listed on its website as case studies.

NHS GCC said this morning that despite working overnight to try to fix the problem, it had not as yet been totally successful.

"Unfortunately... there will still be some patients whose planned appointments today will be affected and we are currently in the process of assessing which patients this will impact upon," it said in a statement today.

"As soon as this has been identified, we will contact the patients direct. We are continuing to work to get the system back online as soon as possible and would like to apologise again to those patients who have been inconvenienced."

TechMarketView director Tola Sargeant said on the firm's blog that the issue highlights the importance of disaster recovery in critical IT situations.

"If nothing else, NHS GGC's problems ought to act as a stark warning to other NHS organisations about the importance of having the right backup and disaster recovery plans in place," she said. "In healthcare, any IT failure really can be a matter of life and death."