Microsoft product glitch blamed for Scottish hospital IT drama

Active Directory corruption apparently led to two-day IT failure which meant cancer patients were among those unable to be treated

A Scottish hospital trust has blamed a fault with a Microsoft programme for an outage which left hundreds of patients unable to attend their scheduled appointments.

On Tuesday morning, Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) NHS trust said an IT problem meant staff could not access patient records, meaning hundreds of patients would have to reschedule their appointments.

Today the trust said the problem has now been fixed, and blamed a glitch with Microsoft Active Directory for the problem.

"The unprecedented IT issue related to our network and the way staff connected to some of our clinical and administrative systems," NHS GGC chief executive Robert Calderwood said.

"The situation is that as users log on they go through a system called Microsoft Active Directory, a router system which recognises users and allows individual access to our clinical and administrative support systems.

"This was corrupted over the weekend, which became apparent when staff logged on to the system on Tuesday after the holiday weekend."

The trust said it was still running full diagnostic checks to find out exactly what caused the problem, and said the repair was solved after its IT team worked with Microsoft and its reseller Charteris.

It added that no information had been lost and any data gathered from appointments and treatments over the past three days will be manually added to the computer systems.

Over the two-day period, 599 outpatient appointments and 62 planned inpatient procedures had to be postponed. Despite claiming to have come across a short-term fix which would enable chemotherapy patients to be seen during the outage, it today conceded the 48 patients due for the treatment had to postpone their appointments too. Calderwood added that affected patients would be offered new appointments as soon as possible.

Over the same period, it also said that more than 10,000 patients had their procedures and appointments as planned due to its manual back-up systems.

Microsoft and Charteris were both yet to respond when contacted by CRN for comments on the matter.