back to article NHS outages KO Welsh GP services and Manchester A&E

A data centre glitch has left doctors in Wales unable to access their patients’ details – while a similar outage in Manchester, England, has placed severe strain on hospitals’ accident and emergency departments. Dr Alan Woodall, chairman of GP Survival UK who works from a surgery in Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, told the Beeb: " …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Pay?

      So Doctors also run the data centre? Thought not.

  2. Adrian Midgley 1

    What the Press office knows

    may be one thing, what they will say another, but the connection of those to current network status - and indeed of the declared status - may well be yet a third thing.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: What the Press office knows

      There is a Soviet / Radio Yerewan joke in there somewhere.

  3. Ravenmorghane

    Doctor?

    Anyone else noticed the 'Doctor' in the photograph is actually a fictional doctor from Star Trek Voyager, played by Robert Picardo. Lol.

    1. richardcox13

      Re: Doctor?

      Who was specifically the Emergency Medical Hologram. For use when you run out of doctors (or the doctors are running away from the Borg).

      Seems appropriate.

    2. caffeine addict

      Re: Doctor?

      Do you think that all the "doctors" in stock photos have medical licenses?

      1. Aladdin Sane

        Re: Doctor?

        Doctor Dre isn't even a real doctor.

        1. Tom Paine
          WTF?

          Re: Doctor?

          Oh, come ON. Next you'll be telling us Professor Green didn't actually defend a PhD!

    3. rmason

      Re: Doctor?

      It's almost like they knew that and selected that image on purpose.

      Lucky buggers, imagine dropping on that image in such a manner.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    id imagine its not the connections, but a 3rd party system, like Emis maybe , or Docman, or Maxims

  5. Flywheel

    I wonder how an NHSbuntu/NHoS based system would have handled it?

    I'll just leave that there...

    1. caffeine addict

      Re: I wonder how an NHSbuntu/NHoS based system would have handled it?

      Wasn't NHoS a desktop OS? So no affect at all on network systems.

      1. Dr Who

        Re: I wonder how an NHSbuntu/NHoS based system would have handled it?

        That's the trouble with too much caffeine. It addles the brain with the result that extreme sarcasm goes straight over your head.

        1. caffeine addict

          Re: I wonder how an NHSbuntu/NHoS based system would have handled it?

          Fair enough. To me, sarcasm without relevance looks a hell of a lot like random non-sequitor.

      2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: I wonder how an NHSbuntu/NHoS based system would have handled it?

        Wasn't NHoS a desktop OS?

        The difference between a desktop version of linux and a server version is (usually) only down to a few differences in package selection..

        At a small scale anyway.

        (Yes, yes, my sarcasm detector *is* working. Sort of.)

  6. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Devil

    Please state the nature of the medical emergency

    Chronic underfunding brought about due to a minister with a privatisation agenda.

    1. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Re: Please state the nature of the medical emergency

      Chronic underfunding brought about due to a minister with a privatisation agenda.

      The first thing that usually crops up here is to note that Health is now a devolved matter, so in political terms Wales and Scotland are completely separate from what happens in England.

      This then often leads on to a discussion of the West Lothian question, which is a discussion about whether or not Welsh and Scottish MPs should be able to vote on such devolved issues at Westminster, where (in theory) only English policies are determined.

      What escapes many people though is that this isn't entirely the case. Due to the wonderful bureaucratic compromise that is the Barnett formula policies on devolved matters in England have an only slightly less than direct bearing on those matters in Wales and Scotland. The politics may be separate, but funding decisions in England directly affect the block grant given to the devolved governments, thus if England decides to reduce NHS spending in England, a corresponding amount is taken out of Welsh and Scottish budgets, and if they wish to maintain NHS funding, they have to make up that shortfall from elsewhere.

      Can you tell this gets me a bit cross?

      M.

      1. Tom Paine

        Re: Please state the nature of the medical emergency

        Welsh health POLICY is devolved, but until the Welsh Assembly is given powers to levy it's own taxes and spend it's income as it sees fit, you can't blame them for funding. That buck (or 70c, these days) stops in Whitehall.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not as devastating as seems to have been made out

    My wife, who works at a large teaching hospital in Wales said that the problems were essentially with external connectivity. Apparently all internal services were operating as normal and paper-based procedures meant that - at her hospital at any rate - there was very little real impact. Normal service was restored by mid afternoon, I gather.

    1. caffeine addict

      Re: Not as devastating as seems to have been made out

      Any idea when it started?

      If you're right that it was fixed mid afternoon (and I'm not doubting you) it's odd that the Beeb didn't report on it til 3pm and ElReg until 6pm. Both would normally jump on a story like that.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not as devastating as seems to have been made out

        All I can say is that it was sorted before she left (normal office hours).

        You might glean some timings from the Informatics Services Twitter feed, though their news page doesn't seem to log times, only dates.

        1. caffeine addict

          Re: Not as devastating as seems to have been made out

          So, based off that twitter feed it was down 2.30 til about 5.15. Presumably both numbers are going to have a bit of lag from the actual times.

      2. cadders

        Re: Not as devastating as seems to have been made out

        Can't speak for Wales but was at an outpatients clinic in Grater Manchester on Tuesday morning. Staff were complaining about computer systems being down then

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Colt Networks had major outage

    that started in the morning and took a few hours to sort. It was based in London but had an effect much wider.

    Maybe the two are linked?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As someone who worked in GP services for 10 years..

    They have continuity plans in place within practices for this sort of thing, but due to moving ever more closely to electronic patient records it could be an issue for allergies etc.

    Fortunately they are likely to have had some access to national systems which will hold some of this data. However for short periods (24/48hrs) outages like this aren't a huge problem.

    If your local GP is saying " we can't treat patients " they are lying, lazy or attention seeking. They can - they are trained, not the computers. As long as they can talk to the patient, access allergy information they are good to go for a limit time. Fortunately over-reaction from GPs in incredibly rare and most just want to get on with the work, they will be more worried about keying in data afterwards and processing tests/results to ensure records are up to date - this it he main issue with outages in IT within practices.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: As someone who worked in GP services for 10 years..

      "If your local GP is saying " we can't treat patients " they are lying, lazy or attention seeking. "

      So when I last went and they pulled up my x-ray results and details of treament and then arrange an appointment for physio. How is that done without a computer?

      I sit there while they send a carrier pigeon to the hospital and then send a small child to run 10 miles to the physio's?

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