Most planned surgery and out-patient hospital appointments in the Southern Health Trust area remain cancelled on Thursday following a major IT incident.
The problem began on Wednesday, and led to ambulances being diverted away from Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry and Craigavon Area Hospital in County Armagh.
The nature of the IT issue – which was declared a major incident – has not yet been explained, although it has been resolved, and the Department of Health has said an “urgent investigation” is under way.
The trust continues to request that patients avoid coming to emergency departments (EDs) in its area “unless absolutely necessary”.
‘Complex issues’
In its latest statement, which was issued at 22:00 BST on Wednesday, the Southern Health Trust confirmed that IT issues which caused disruption “have been resolved and all systems have been restored”.
“We will be testing our systems overnight and they will be reconnected in a phased manner tomorrow (Thursday),” it added.
The trust said the cause of the outage is not suspected to be related to cyber issues.
Although most planned surgeries and hospital appointments have been cancelled, the trust said its community services “are expected to operate as normal” on Thursday.
Affected patients have been contacted and cancelled appointments are to be rescheduled as soon as possible, the trust added.
Throughout the incident, the Southern Trust said it had prioritised emergency and critically ill patients, but it has asked people to still avoid coming to emergency departments “unless absolutely necessary”.
The Department of Health said it was “made aware of a major incident” relating to the Southern Health Trust’s IT systems on Wednesday morning.
It added that although the cause was not yet known, it was “under urgent investigation to try to restore normal service as quickly as possible”.
GoogleThe Southern Health Trust covers a number of hospitals and care centres across counties Armagh, Down and Tyrone.
As well as Daisy Hill and Craigavon hospitals, it also runs the South Tyrone Hospital in Dungannon, Lurgan Hospital and St Luke’s Hospital in County Armagh
Several patients arrived at hospitals on Wednesday expecting to receive treatment, only to find out their appointments had been cancelled at the last minute.
In its latest statement, the Southern Trust said it was “hugely grateful” for the support of the ambulance service, other health trust and the wider health and social care system.
“It will take some time for normal business to be fully restored, and we sincerely apologise once again for the disruption,” the trust added.
Staff ‘coping very well’
The Southern Trust’s Medical Director, Stephen Austin, said the patients who were already in hospitals were being “appropriately treated” on Wednesday.
He said the situation was “more challenging” than normal for his staff but he insisted they were “very calm and coping very well” with the disruption.
“It’s been an IT outage so some of the electronic systems for labs and patient records and radiology are not working as normal,” Mr Austin told News NI.
“So its a bit slower than normal but staff are doing workarounds to take care and make sure that patient care and safety is prioritised and that’s our prime focus.”
He added Southern Trust hospitals were helped by other health trusts which had accepted diverted ambulances.
“I’ve been very grateful to them, so that’s just keeping patients safe, going forward.”
Like all other trusts in Northern Ireland, the Southern Trust has recently moved to a new fully digitised system to manage patient records.
Mr Austin admitted that because of the IT issue, staff resorted to using pens and paper as a fallback “so we can keep good records and keep track of patients”.
“That’s the way that doctors and nurses [were] able to work like that in the past and [they’re] able to go back to that,” he said.
“Bit of a challenge having gone with electronic, but they’re quite comfortable with that.”
However, a member of Stormont’s health committee said the ambulance diversions had put extra strain on other trusts which were “already under significant pressure”.
Diane Dodds from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) said the cancellation of operations were “bitterly disappointing” for patients who had been on waiting lists.
“I will be pressing the trust to have these appointments and operations rescheduled as quickly as possible,” she told the ‘s Evening Extra programme on Wednesday.
