Hospitals IT failure cost estimated at £675,000

A software defect which caused an IT systems outage across several Northern Care Alliance hospitals earlier this year – including Rochdale Infirmary – cost an estimated £675,000.

In May, IT systems failed at three of the Northern Care Alliance-managed hospitals – Rochdale Infirmary, Royal Oldham and Fairfield General – plus North Manchester General, which is managed by the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, causing severe delays.
 

Read more: Ongoing IT issues cause severe delays at local hospitalsPublished: 25 May 2022

In a report presented to the board of directors of the Northern Care Alliance, the ‘root cause’ of the incident was identified as a software defect. 

The defect was identified in the VMware vSAN storage software, which allows businesses to run multiple application and operating system workloads on the one server.

A specific set of events triggered the software defect, causing data to become unavailable on hospital systems.

The report says that the software defect was present in the previous two versions of the product, but was resolved in an update, which is currently used by the hospital trust. The report adds that VMware has said that “the same issue cannot occur again.”

Approximately 1,000 appointments and procedures were cancelled, with the biggest impact on ‘high volume’ specialities such as rheumatology and ophthalmology.

The report stated that the 'cost of managing and recovering from the impact of the outage from a systems and process perspective is currently estimated at £675,000 with the bulk of the cost across the digital and group access and admin teams'.

The outage affected the majority of services at the NHS trust, with 69% of staff responding to an internal debrief, saying they were unable to deliver their usual activities. Most activity affected was patient-facing.

Hospital staff had been left using paper processes and dictaphone records rather than directly updating patient records digitally.

There were 327 incidents of low harm reported with the top three areas of risk being Medications related (of which almost half relate to missed drug dosage), documentation and IT security.

Additionally, there were two incidents of moderate harm (one medication error and one surgery-related incident not reported for 26 days following the incident) and one serious incident where a referral was made to the coroner containing incorrect patient information.

Internal investigations are underway for all moderate and above incidents of harm in line with trust incident management policy.

It is anticipated the current number of incidents reported may increase over the next few weeks or months, due to missed and delayed doses potentially causing preventable illnesses, such as hospital-acquired DVT.

The report states that incidents relating to the outage may still be detected in the future due to communication failures caused by the outage.