IT crash at Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals resolved

Two midlands hospitals were hit by a major IT crash today, forcing the cancellation of appointments as staff struggled to access patient records.

Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust suffered a “critical internal incident” this morning related to “technical issues with computer software systems” overnight.

Both Peterborough City Hospital and Stamford Hospital were affected.

A trust spokeswoman told Digital Health News late on Thursday afternoon that the issue had now been resolved and the trust would be operating normally on Friday.

Earlier she said that the error had started with the telephone system crashing overnight, but the problem spread to other systems as engineers attempted fix the issues.

The phones were working by this afternoon but the trust continued to have intermitent connection failures with email, the internet and the patient administration system, she said.

Back-up systems that should have kicked in also did not work as expected.

The fault appears to be related to a hardware failure but the exact cause, and why it has spread to affect other systems, was still being determined.

“Our system is not as robust as we had thought," the trust acknowledged.

Earlier in the day, chief executive Stephen Graves said all appointments and some operations had been cancelled today in the interests of patient safety.

It was later clarified that 420 of a total of 1,700 appointments and only a few operations had been cancelled, specifically those that were reliant on staff accessing patient records.

“We have not taken this decision lightly and sincerely apologise to those patients affected. We will reschedule cancelled appointments as early as possible.

He said work was ongoing to resolve the fault and more updates would be provided later today.

Earlier this year, the trust announced it had picked Medway’s System C to deploy as an electronic patient record, replacing its 25-year old CliniCom PAS.

Other systems used at the trust include Nervecentre’s electronic observations system, and analytics software from Connexica.

There were also plans to deploy Kainos’ Evolve electronic document management system this year.

Last month, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust also suffered a major IT crash affecting its pathology system, requiring the rescheduling of more than a hundred operations, with ongoing issues still affecting some testing.

Digital Health Intelligence: holds information on the clinical systems installed at trusts across the UK and uses this to calculate a Clinical Digital Maturity Index score. Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has a has CDMI score of 64 and a ranking of 108 / 152. (subscription / log-in required).