One of the NHS’s biggest hospital trusts is facing serious problems after its IT system failed due to extreme temperatures earlier this week.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust (GSTT) in London had to cancel operations, postpone appointments and divert seriously ill patients to other hospitals in the capital as a result of the IT failure.
The situation means doctors cannot view patients’ medical notes remotely and must write down all test results by hand. They also cannot remotely access the results of diagnostic tests such as X-rays and CT and MRI scans and must instead call the imaging department, which overloads the department’s phone lines.
The GSTT declared the issue a “critical site incident”. He apologized to patients and asked them to bring letters or other documentation of their condition to their appointment to help overcome doctors’ loss of access to their medical history.
Both data centres, one at Guy’s Hospital and the other at St Thomas’ Hospital, were down on Tuesday afternoon as Britain experienced record temperatures. Air-conditioning units meant to cool them failed, trust sources said.
As a result, the trust’s 23,500 staff lost access to the clinical applications they use to store and share information about patient histories and conditions.
The GSTT confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the issue had not been resolved.
This has significantly disrupted the normal functioning of GSTT hospitals. For safety reasons, the trust has been forced to divert to other hospitals four types of very unwell patients it had to admit: those with heart problems awaiting organ transplants, those with vascular problems and those due to receive potentially life-saving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy.
A doctor at GSTT, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “It has a big effect. We have reverted to using paper and do not see electronic notes existing. We need to do a triage of basic tests like blood tests and scans. There is no access to the results except by phone and of course the whole hospital tries to use this line.
“Frankly, this is a big patient safety issue and we haven’t been told how long it will take to fix it. We are refocusing on core specialist services such as cardiac, vascular and ECMO.”
GSTT is a regional center of excellence in several areas of specialty care, including pulmonary, critical care and transplant.
The trust publicly acknowledged, via messages on its Twitter feed, that it was experiencing problems with its technology, but gave few details about the extent of the disruption caused.
Soon after the outage first occurred on Tuesday, he tweeted: “We are experiencing some issues with our IT and phone systems.” On Wednesday, he said: “We continue to have some issues with our IT and phone systems which we are working hard to fix.”
It tweeted again on Thursday to say it was “still working hard to fix issues with our IT systems”.
He gave little detail in any of the tweets about the scale of the disruption. However, in his tweets on Thursday he hinted at how services were affected, apologizing to patients who “had problems contacting us or had problems accessing our services”.
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It then added: “We are trying to contact anyone whose appointment we have to cancel. If you are visiting us today, please bring any letters or documents we have sent you to your appointment to help us reduce the risk of delays.’
In a statement, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust said: “As a result of Tuesday’s extreme temperatures, we experienced significant disruption to our IT systems, which is having an ongoing impact on our services.
“Although the majority of appointments have taken place, we have unfortunately had to postpone some surgeries and appointments and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
“The trust has well-established business continuity plans to enable us to continue as much business as possible and ensure patient safety is a priority at all times.
“Our teams are working around the clock to fix these issues as soon as possible.”
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