The Minister of Health has confirmed that there is “no suggestion” that a major IT outage within the Southern Health Trust on September 17 was cyber related.
Following the outage patients were advised not to attend “hospital or community services” appointments and “ambulance diverts” were put in place while the issues were investigated.
Services were restored the following day (September 18) but widespread disruption continued.
On the day of the outage, Armagh and Newry MLA Justin McNulty wrote to the Minister of Health, Mike Nesbitt for an update on the outage, his assessment of the impact on patients’ health and wellbeing and asked how his Department is moving to reassure patients and staff that it will not happen again.
Minister Nesbitt explained that the issue was “isolated to the Southern Trust” but impacted across their sites and added “there is no suggestion that this was a cyber related matter”.
Said the Minister: “The outage led to a loss of the computer network via two data centres which prevented access to key systems across the Trust.
“The resultant impact necessitated the postponement of elective activity on 17 and 18 September and the diversion of ambulances to other Trust emergency departments throughout 17 September. Community Services were impacted to a lesser extent.
“Both impacted data centres were restored by 5pm on 17 September, providing access in the first instance to priority systems relating to labs, EDs, ICU and night medicines, which allowed both Daisy Hill and Craigavon Area Hospitals to recommence receipt of ambulance arrivals from 9pm and 10.30pm respectively.”
In regards to locating the source of the issue, the Minister said The Trust are “working at pace” to rebook postponed appointments and procedures as soon as possible and that the Department for Health will support this prompt rebooking via waiting list funding if required.
Early “unverified” assessments of the impact, according to the Minister, indicates approximately 1,600 patients were impacted by postponements.
“It should be noted that there were no postponements beyond the 17 and 18 September and Adult Community Clinics were not impacted during the major incident timeframe,” added Minister Nesbitt.
While the major incident was formally stood down the morning of September 18, the Minister recognises that recovery efforts will “continue for some time”.
Continued Minister Nesbitt: “As with any major incident, the HSC has a process to understand the cause and impact, and to identify any learning or rectifications to prevent a recurrence.
“To this end, I can confirm that a root cause analysis of the reasons for the outage is underway. My Department will oversee the recovery and learning processes associated with this major incident.”
