Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) is facing major issues after its IT system failed as a result of the unprecedented high temperatures this week.
The Guardian reported that one of the NHS’ largest hospital trusts has been forced to cancel operations, postpone appointments and divert seriously ill patients to other hospitals in London because of the IT problems.
Whilst the system is down, doctors cannot see patients’ medical notes remotely and are having to write down the results of all examinations by hand. GSTT has labelled the issue a “critical site incident” and has apologised to patients, the Guardian also revealed.
In a statement, Guy’s and St Thomas’ said: “As a result of the extreme temperatures on Tuesday we have experienced significant disruption to our IT systems, which is having an ongoing impact on our services.“While the majority of appointments have gone ahead, unfortunately we have had to postpone some operations and appointments and we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.“The trust has well-established business continuity plans to allow us to continue as much activity as possible and to ensure that patient safety is prioritised at all times.“Our teams are working around the clock to fix these problems as soon as possible.”
The trust tweeted that they were experiencing problems on July 19 and on July 21 it confirmed that the issues were still ongoing and it was continuing to try to resolve them.
We are still working hard to fix problems with our IT systems.
We apologise if you have had trouble contacting us or had any issues accessing our services. (1/3)
— Guy's and St Thomas' (@GSTTnhs) July 21, 2022
Guy’s and St Thomas’ is not the only trust to have suffered issues with its IT systems in the last few months. Back in May, the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust confirmed it has been experiencing “disruption and reliability issues” with some of its IT systems, affecting a number of its hospital sites.