News

IT failure at Royal Berks could see service reduced

October 25, 2012

Services provided at Royal Berkshire Hospital could be reduced today due to an IT failure.

Patients with scheduled appointments should still attend but anyone with minor non-life-threatening injuries is urged to seek medical treatment elsewhere, rather than visiting the emergency department.

Hospital spokesman Joe Wise said: "Due to a fault in the IT system some routine services may have to be curtailed at the Royal Berkshire Hospital today.

"Patients due to attend out patients clinics or for pre-planned surgery should attend as arranged unless we contact them in person.

"However, we would ask patients with minor non-life-threatening injuries to use alternative services such as minor injury units, the walk-in centre in Broad Street Mall or their own GP rather than coming to the emergency department."

A number of things are affected, including email and X-ray facilities. The new electronic patient record which came under fire at a Council of Governor's meeting last month is also affected.

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Most recent user comments 15 of 15

According to the other place parts of the system are back up and running and the hospital should be back to normal Tomorrow.

There will now be some fun meetings with much passing the blame, rather than doing a proper RCA.

NotJohn, Reading
25/10/2012 at 19:03

Gissajob and I'll tackle it!! I love a challenge, and I only cost £20.000. After too long looking and getting nowhere, it would be a start ...

Dada, Reading
25/10/2012 at 16:04

Another successful project by CSC :-(

NotJohn, Reading
25/10/2012 at 15:57

Looks like they made their IT team redundant at the end of 2009. Nearly three years later it doesn't appear that they have made much progress, other than burn millions of pounds on an incomplete system and ineffective support.

http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2063687_hospital_it_team_made_redundant

Soupa' Badd, Krypton
25/10/2012 at 15:01

Instead of each separate NHS entity outsourcing its IT functions to rapacious and greedy consultancies just think how much money could be saved by continuing to develop their own systems in house.

Mountain Cat, Tilehurst
25/10/2012 at 14:49

£70m!!! How many services could that money buy?

Soupa' Badd, Krypton
25/10/2012 at 13:32

This is shocking considering they have committed to a £50m outsourcing deal with CSC for their IT support. Furthermore, they have overspent by £20m on the electronic patient records system, and still do not have all the functionality promised. Who the hell allows £70m to be spent with such little oversight. IT companies are only as good as the contracts they are bound by. Someone at the trust needs to be held accountable.

http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/8134/royal-berks-spends-%C2%A330m-on-cerner-epr

Soupa' Badd, Krypton
25/10/2012 at 13:31

There are competent IT companies in the area. I wonder who the Royal Berks hired?

NotJohn, Reading
25/10/2012 at 12:24

There should be a disaster recovery plan in place which should have been tested as part of implementing a new system...

Just because a system has failed does not mean the answer is to simply rollback and reload backups from underlying databases, it could well be that a small enhancement has damaged data in an unexpected way so they may need to consider fixing broken data as well as backing out code or possible backups. If something has broken down affecting such a wide range of services I would guess it's probably at the middleware layer.

I'm a test analyst with dev experience that would gladly get involved in fixing this.

Hobogeddon, Reading
25/10/2012 at 12:19

Agree with Fred Bloggs, that even if they have backups, it isn't necessarily a quick fix to restore them. It does seem surprising that there isn't a Plan B when the IT fails, as one would hope that there would be a way that the hospital could function as normally as possible in the event of an IT failure.

Smiffy, Reading
25/10/2012 at 11:44

Should have hired me... then they wouldn't have this problem :D

L
25/10/2012 at 11:31

Looks like another contracted out IT failure.

Mountain Cat, Tilehurst
25/10/2012 at 10:47

Perhaps their back up could be lists on paper.....

Snowdrop, Twyford
25/10/2012 at 10:24

Backups can take a long time to recover from, depending on what software is being used.

More importantly, there is no fault tolerance or high availability!