Connecting for Health (CfH) and BT have confirmed that the NHS Spine will be unavailable when it is taken down for a major upgrade from next Friday evening until Sunday morning (9-11 November).
The Department of Health agency describes the refresh of software and hardware as ‘unusual’ and ‘unlikely’ to occur again in the future. A practice ‘refresh’ of the Spine has already been carried out as a dry run in a recent technical rehearsal.
CfH is warning that the planned maintenance work will affect all NPfIT systems linked to the Spine, including: the Personal Demographic Service, Choose and Book and GP2GP.
The agency said the upgrades did not represent a complete replacement of the Spine. “The exercise is solely an uplift of the database management hardware and software. The application code and functionality of the Spine remain unchanged. The change will be transparent to users,” said a spokesperson.
BT says the upgrade, which includes a refresh of the Spine software and hardware, is required in order to “enable a more automated, faster and surer failover process and continuing levels of quality support.”
A CfH spokesperson said: “Maintenance of the Spine usually takes place with no obvious impact to system users. As this maintenance session implements a complete software and hardware refresh of the database infrastructure, NHS Connecting for Health have had to adopt a different approach.”
The period of planned maintenance is from 2200 on Friday 9 November to 1000 Sunday 11 November 2007.
CfH said: “Usual business continuity measures, which all organisations should have in place, should be adopted during the period of planned maintenance.”
In guidance to trusts, CfH says that some services may be affected: “The NHS CfH architecture is designed to allow systems to run in local mode if they are unable to contact the Spine. GP and hospital patient administration systems will still be available during the 36-hour maintenance period. However, their integration with national systems and services, such as Choose and Book and the Personal Demographics Service may be affected.”
Choose and Book will face major disruption during the planned maintenance for all users.
Over the weekend of 10-11 November, clinicians and patients will not be able to view, make, change or cancel an appointment using the Choose and Book service. There will be no access to the Directory of Services and callers to the Choose and Book appointments line will only be able to have discussions about choice.
CfH has advised clinics operating during this time to print patient referral information for the 36-hours downtime in advance.
GP practices using the GP2GP service to transfer records will not be able to send or receive information from 2200 on Thursday 8 November to 1000 Sunday 11 November 2007, allowing for the 24 hours transfer completion time.
It will not be possible to issue prescriptions with barcodes on them, so pharmacy dispensers will have to manually input prescription items into their systems.
In addition, updates to patient demographic data will not be saved on the Personal Demographic Service during the downtime.
CfH said trusts have been aware of these plans since the beginning of the month and should be well prepared for the maintenance period. “The overall impact is expected to be minimal,” the agency said.
Adding that the benefits of the proposed maintenance will include the ability to make use of new and emerging technologies, access to improved functionality, maintained stability and speedier recovery, improved system performance and on-going quality of support.
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