The true scale of harm caused to patients by massive IT failures across four of the region’s major hospitals for weeks is yet to reveal itself, NHS trust bosses have said. The admission comes as the chiefs share the root cause of the outages which forced the hospitals to move from an IT system to a paper system for days.
NHS staff told the Manchester Evening News that thousands of patients were being affected by delays to care, caused by a major IT failure across four hospitals in Greater Manchester back in May. The IT issues caused chaos with electronic prescribing, viewing patients’ medical records, finding test results - as well forcing appointments and surgeries to be cancelled.
IT experts had to be flown in from the United States of America to work on the fix. Meanwhile, patients who had waited for months for treatment, including cancer surgeries, arrived at hospital to find out their procedure would no longer be going ahead.
