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Message from Rachel Barlow, Chief Operating Officer and David Carruthers, Medical Director: Internal IT Incident update

June 1, 2018

Dear Colleagues

It’s been a challenging  week for many clinical teams at the Sandwell site with the IT infrastructure impacting on the availability of PCs, phones and clinical devices such as pathology. We want to again thank all our clinical, operational and IT staff who have worked hard to sustain clinical services. We have made significant progress in terms of restoring IT service provision in the last 24 hours.

Pathology:

  • Biochemistry is now working normally and the backlog of routine OP and GP samples is resolved.
  • Haematology is processing routine samples normally.
  • The current process to upload results to the computer system remains manual (with electronic viewing available to clinical teams). We hope to resolve this in the next 24 hours and return to an automated not transcribed results service.
  • The pathology team have worked incredibly hard to catch up on the routine backlogs so well done!

Rebooking cancelled patients

  • The elective surgical patients that we regrettably cancelled for safety reasons on Wednesday have all been rebooked for their treatment.
  • The rebooking of patients who had outpatients and diagnostics cancelled is more than 90% complete with less than 10 patients to be booked on Monday.

Localised PC and phone issues

  • The localised user experience issues with regards to use of PCs and VOIP phones has been resolved in the main block and the IT team are visiting areas now to confirm that impact.
  • OP reception, elective access and pharmacy computers and phones are also fully restored.

We mobilised an Informatics Outreach team to clinical areas on the Sandwell site today, with operational and clinical leaders, to assess with staff locally their IT issues.  We have collected 113 issues; 41% were device issues, 17% printing related and 7% reported non-working VOIP phones. There were a number of other issues not related to the incident this week but are making it harder than need be to work efficiently in clinical areas.

The issues we collected from the outreach process identified many more issues than we have recorded on the helpdesk. We will continue to review the IT service provision and experiences at Sandwell over the weekend and twice daily next week, to ensure we make those necessary improvements and ensure resilience of the IT infrastructure.  We will provide ward and departmental managers feedback by next Friday as to the progress against each item raised.

We will use this experience to review how we best work between informatics and clinical services going forward. Please work with us to report issues through the IT helpdesk (extension 4050) which we will review daily.

Thank you for your patience and resilience.  Have a great weekend.

Best wishes

Rachel Barlow, Chief Operating Officer

David Carruthers, Medical Director