A 90-year-old great-gran was left 'freezing' in the back of an ambulance for more than three hours, say her worried family. The frail patient was rushed to a Greater Manchester emergency department in crippling pain following a fall, and faced huge delays after reportedly being told staff could not check her in due to IT issues.
The gran-of-10's family claim she was left on a bed in a corridor for another two hours when she was eventually brought into the ward. Royal Oldham Hospital is among four A&E's in the region plagued by two-weeks of IT chaos, wreaking havoc with even the most basic tasks. The elderly patient has been recovering from a hip replacement when she fell and seriously injured the other side of her body.
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“She was in the ambulance, sat outside A&E for three-and-a-half hours,” the woman’s son-in-law told the Manchester Evening News . “The nurses told her ‘we can’t book people in, we’ve got IT problems.’”
When relatives arrived at the hospital, they claim staff were unsure whether the 90-year-old great-grandma was still in the ambulance outside. “We said we’d have to go and bang on all the ambulances outside to find out where she was,” continued the son-in-law.
“Then another nurse came out from the back with a handwritten book and started looking through it. The nurse said ‘go through there, turn right and she’ll be in a corridor.’”
After another two-hour wait in the corridor, medics determined she would need yet another operation the next morning, according to the relatives. The ordeal has left the family shaken, they say.
Have you been affected by the IT chaos? Call the M.E.N. newsdesk on 0161 211 2920 or email helena.vesty@reachplc.com
“My mother-in-law was freezing in that ambulance, in a massive amount of pain,” added the worried relative. “I can’t fault the paramedics who looked after her, but if they’ve got lots of people in ambulances waiting because they can’t book anyone in, it’s going to be tying up paramedics for a long time
“Then when you get into the hospital, staff can’t even tell you if someone’s there or not.”
IT chaos has hit Oldham Royal, Fairfield General , Rochdale Infirmary and North Manchester General over the past two weeks, wreaking havoc with even the most basic tasks. The systems that have been down include those storing patients’ medical records, meaning doctors cannot go ahead with surgeries and appointments. The IT applications used to retrieve test results, including blood, MRI and CT scans, have also been out of action, medics have told the Manchester Evening News .
Ambulances have also been seen queueing up outside the affected hospitals' emergency departments. Royal Oldham's A&E has been inundated with patients, with trust bosses urging people to stay away from the emergency department unless absolutely necessary.
Although the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, which operates three out of the four sites, has reported that some systems have come back online. It also has ruled out any cyber-attack, malware or hacking as the cause, though the trust has not shared any initial findings about what kickstarted the disruption for patients and staff, saying the 'main focus is restoration of services, once that's done detailed root cause analysis work will take place'.
The trust has declared critical incidents at all three of its hospitals but is still asking patients to come to hospital if they need to, and keep their appointments unless they are contacted to say otherwise.
Dr Chris Brookes, Deputy CEO and Chief Medical Officer for the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust said: “We would like to sincerely apologise to the patient and their family whose experience fell below our usual standards.
“While we continue to make progress to fix some of the critical systems affected so they can be released to colleagues, we appreciate there may have been some delays as a result and some patients might not have been seen in a timely manner.
“Our teams continue to work incredibly hard and we thank everyone for their understanding at this challenging time, during which patient safety remains our priority.”
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