Sysadmins fail to fix NHS IT snafu, HUNDREDS of appointments cancelled IT staff at the UK's largest health board have failed to fix a major system error that's cutting health workers off from clinical and administrative services. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) had to cancel 288 outpatient appointments yesterday along with four planned inpatient procedures, 23 day cases and 40 chemotherapy …
How will a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta help? Or is that what they're playing while on hold? If the latter, it sounds like they really need the whole Ring Cycle?
GG&C is a muddled mess of old health boards shoved together, they have a lot of management, team leaders etc.
I'm just curious if this is down to lack of change management with a staff member doing something silly, however as it's IT this would almost certainly be covered up with "transient network issues".
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
Every time there's an issue in the cloud, there are plenty of people taking the "told you so" line. This appears to be an example of the reverse. Running your own data centre is all very nice and you can certainly touch everything, but it's very expensive indeed to provide the sort of N+1 or 1+1 redundancy that is standard fare in colo or managed data centres. I'm not taking sides here, just trying to balance the argument a bit.
Ah, but if the problem is in-house, with your own employees, then you can at least bang some heads together and threaten to kick people out of the door.
If the problem is either in the Cloud, or with some outsourcing outfit, all you can do is threaten to not renew your contract in 4 years, by which time everybody will have forgotten!
Of course, if the contract was negotiated properly, you may get some financial recompense, but I don't trust any of out public organisations to be that good at getting such clauses into a contract....
These do happen. For me it's a bit rich to accuse of system of failing the patient because one the basis of one days downtime. I'd need to know what benefits it created the days it was running. Then I have an idea of whether this is a story or not.
If, on the other hand, they can't quantify the benefits of the system, just turn the bloody thing off of course.
Sure, outages happen. But good design should make such an outage relatively short. Keeping critical systems up even when things are failing should be part of the design and change process.
One day's down time for a regional health authority equates to hundreds of thousands of pounds of wasted resource, even more if you take into account the time of the people who attended their out-patients appointments without being seen.
I sometimes remember when I used to talk to a power engineer in a regional electricity distribution company, where five nines is a way of life, not an aspiration.
Absolutely outages do work, but it's how fast you recover from a major outage and what the cause of that outage is that's important. Users will accept, grudgingly that there will be outages, but they won't accept one which drags on with little or no information coming from IT, which is usually the case.
As someone who's been involved in investigating incidents like this within the NHS it's likely that half truths are already flying around and users are getting half of the story whilst IT management try to cover up a complete balls up. Let's hope that's not the case, for a change.
It ties all the clinical Applications together as well as the respective data, clinicians can then logon enter a users Unique ID, view information, tests etc which have been collected from various applications in different departments, etc NHSGG&C is a damn site better integrated system wise than Englands NHS
I think you're missing the point, boards in Scotland are increasing going towards paperless or at least paperlight working, meaning there's nothing to refer to . for example if you're going to give someone radiation treatment it's quite important to do so in the correct location not with the patient pointing and saying "around here" and with the correct dose etc.
So a poorly planned system that's had a thousand political fingers screwing up the design, and now that it's not working it's again the fault of the sysadmins. No matter how unmaintainable the system might actually be. Same old, same old in other words. Nobody ever looks at or blames the wonks who got promoted for delivering an unmaintainable system of course.
This system has been developed locally by the board, it's got nothing to do with politicians. Every health board is doing the same, developing something similar but as usual there's no one system that fits all due to regional demands being different, but they'll all still interconnect when up and running where required.
Political interference in the NHS is rife but it's not the cause of this, although I did find it funny that the muppet Scottish Health Minister said that boards would review their backups etc. I think you'll find most do that very regularly anyway.. usual minister talking about something he clearly knows nothing about.
This will boil down to one of two things:
1. Incompetent management or staff member.
2. Lack of oversight of change management.
"NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (GGC) had to cancel 288 outpatient appointments yesterday along with four planned inpatient procedures, 23 day cases and 40 chemotherapy treatments when IT systems crashed."
With such a huge scale of operations across Glasgow, the quoted loss of activity is tiny. I'll bet the usual daily DNAs plus cancellations due to staff/theatre non-availability is ten times greater.....
Bang on the mark. There are very few parts of the organisation that have a critical reliance on IT, mostly outpatient clinics where records, test results and referrals from GP's are pulled from various internal and external sytems via the Clinical Portal.
Local radio had one doctor on - he saw all his patients today. Phoned up the GPs who faxed over patient notes. Colleagues - some did, some didn't.
Son of a friend works in IT there. He says where patients showed up, they could send janitors (or whoever) to get their files. They just couldn't know in advance who would show up.
And my money's on the AD login.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
