Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust declared a critical incident on Friday (25 October) after a power cut affected phone, email and clinical systems.

During the outage on Friday, Tim Guyler, director of integration for NUH, said that engineers were working on site to restore power as soon as possible and contingencies had been put in place “to support those services which are most affected”.

Power was eventually restored at 6pm on Saturday and the trust is now contacting patients who had appointments cancelled due to the outage.

WHY IT MATTERS

The power cut prevented access to several software systems including the East Midlands Radiology Consortium’s (EMRAD) cloud-based solution, which enables clinicians to access radiology images for patients.

It also prevented access to the electronic patient record (EPR) system, Nervecentre, and theatre management system Bluespier.

The trust was also not able to access to pathology test results, complete discharge summaries online, print patient bands and labels or electronically access the blood bank during the outage.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

NUH is one of England’s largest acute trusts. Earlier this year, it became one of three trusts to join the newly-formed UK Health Data Research Alliance. Along with Barts Health and University Hospitals Birmingham, it will work with partner organisations to improve access to datasets and accelerate progress in science and healthcare. 

ON THE RECORD

NUH medical director Dr Keith Girling said: “NUH’s IT systems are very largely back to normal after a power failure to our IT systems at our Nottingham City Hospital site early on Friday, 25th October which disrupted internal phone systems, email and some clinical systems.

“Contingency plans were put in place to keep services to patients running and we were able to restore computer systems by 6pm on Saturday. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this situation has caused to patients and their families – we’ll be in contact with any patients to re-arrange any appointments which had to be cancelled.

“We would also like to thank our staff for their hard work over the weekend in responding to this incident.”