GPs resort to pen and paper as six-day IT outage ‘severely’ disrupts services
GP practices in one part of England are facing an ongoing IT systems outage which has forced them to hand-write forms, and caused huge backlogs and ‘severe’ disruption to services over the past week.
The IT issues in West Yorkshire were caused by problems with data centres that support IT systems in primary care in the Bradford District and Craven, according to the local Health and Care Partnership.
GPs told Pulse that the incident, which began last Sunday and is affecting about half of the practices in the area, forced some practices to close temporarily and the LMC warned that the wellbeing of GPs and their staff ‘has been ignored’ as morale at practices ‘is dropping by the hour’.
YOR LMC medical secretary Dr Brian McGregor told Pulse he had local GPs messaging him ‘at midnight’, having started at 7am ‘desperately trying to maintain services’.
One GP, who wished to remain anonymous, said their practice was unable to generate pathology forms, meaning staff had to hand-write forms instead.
Their practice was also unable to send SMS messages to patients or access Patches, its online consultation service.
Affected GP practice systems were still able to run on ‘contingency mode’ but this limited normal access to SystmOne.
The GP told Pulse: ‘We’ve got a backlog of documents building up, and we’re going to need to pay overtime to get back on top of that backlog.
‘A lot of the back office function hasn’t been able to function properly, and there’s also a huge impact on staff who are already very stressed. It just makes everything a whole lot worse.
‘We’re working on something called contingency mode – which is a desktop gives limited access to SystemOne – so we’re not able to generate pathology forms, so we’re having to hand-write all of our pathology forms. They’re not able to pull through NHS mail in relation so we’ve got a backlog of clinical records building up from our setup.’
They said the impact on other practices in the Health and Care Partnership area, which serves a population of 650,000 people, had been ‘pretty severe’.
They added: ‘On Monday, a couple of practices made the decisions to close their doors to patients for a period of time, because this contingency mode that we have wasn’t working either, so we couldn’t access patient notes at all.
‘We had that situation ourselves on Monday afternoon – we carried on with urgent people who were walking in, but we made the decision to cancel some routine work because it simply wasn’t safe.’
The GP said communication with the West Yorkshire ICB and West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership since Monday has been ‘a bit disappointing’.
They added: ‘They have started out sending once or twice daily emails at the moment, giving a bit of an idea about what’s been going on, but we’ve still not been told exactly what’s happened. We’ve not been given a firm timeframe for when it’s going to be fixed.
‘It set up an email address for us to start sending in what our actual backlog was and what problems it was causing – that was three days into it.’
Dr McGregor said that any conversation about resource or support to cover additional costs and recovery has so far been ‘pushed aside’.
He said: ‘I have had GPs messaging me at midnight, having started at 7am desperately trying to maintain services.
‘The wellbeing of GPs and their staff has been ignored – morale is dropping by the hour, there is no confidence in the IT system, even if restored the expectation is we will be in the same position within weeks.
‘One of our largest practices was literally about to announce proudly reducing their wait for a routine appointment to under a week following months of hard work – that four-day wait has doubled already and likely to increase further with this chaos. The build up to this involved six weeks of system failures highlighting the problems.’
According to an update from the Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership, the incident was not a cyber attack and no patient data was breached.
It said: ‘Patient information remains safe and secure. Additional technical resource has been brought in to help resolve the issue, and a phased recovery plan is being actively progressed.’
It also said additional appointments offered at weekends would not run this weekend to ‘help create the conditions needed to apply IT fixes safely’ and give ‘the best chance of restoring full functionality from Monday’.
West Yorkshire ICB said: ‘Our priority remains supporting practices and maintaining safe patient care. A full learning and improvement process will follow once the immediate incident is resolved.’
It said there have been twice daily updates to practices and these will continue.
Pulse has contacted The Health Informatics Service (THIS), which is believed to have carried out the data centre upgrade work, for comment.
Last month, Suffolk GPs faced thousands of duplicate pathology results following a ‘software failure’ at a hospital trust, which had ‘significant knock-on effects’ on practices.
And Pulse also reported on a flawed IT system rollout which led to delayed blood tests and cancelled GP appointments across Nottinghamshire.
