The Department of Health has said that “some non-core interfaces” will continue to be disrupted by the global IT outage that has been affecting hospital and GP services here since Friday.
The department confirmed that three major hospital systems and one GP system were affected – but that GP system, affects around 60% of practices in Northern Ireland.
A spokesperson said that “all GP practices will have core system access for beginning of normal business on Monday, although some non-core interfaces such as Emergency Care Summary and Key Information Summary that do not affect direct patient care may be later in week”.
“Detailed communications are being issued to all affected GP practices for Monday morning.
“It will take some time to ascertain exactly what the operational impact of the outages were, as services recover from Friday’s issues. Initial assessments are that there has been minimal impact or cancellation to patient care in hospitals.
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“The sorts of impacts that are beginning to be returned include: theatres and scopes continued but delayed start time for radiotherapy clinics and some theatre timing slots, and some issues with respect to staffing over the weekend but these were mitigated and workarounds put in place. A more definitive position, including an assessment of the impact on GP practice business on Friday, will be developed in the coming days.”
The tech breakdown was sparked by a faulty file from a US cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike.
The firm’s protection services are used by tens of thousands of large organisations, with airlines, banks, telecoms companies, broadcasters and other businesses halted as a result of the outage.
Hospital issues included difficulties booking patients into operating theatres, accessing staff rosters, capturing digital endoscopy images and operating radiotherapy services as well as some primary care services.
Affected GP practices were left unable to access their clinical system to view and update patient records, and they could not generate routine patient prescriptions and test requests, or see results of laboratory tests.
The Department of Health added: “Given we are part way through a number of major roll-out programmes, these issues affected our five hospital Trusts differently. The NI Ambulance Service and GP Out of Hours services were unaffected.
“All teams including affected GP practices implemented their business continuity plans with a focus on ensuring those clinically urgent patients were managed first. This is a normal part of the HSC contingency arrangements.”