Select a region
The States are continuing to battle problems with patients' electronic health records.
The system is understood to have been down for at least one week. As of yesterday afternoon, the problems causing the outage remained widespread.
Doctors, nurses and other staff are having to gather and transfer patients' details manually while IT experts from Guernsey and the UK try to repair the faults affecting the island's ageing electronic system.
Pictured: Health staff are relying on paper records while repairs are made to the island's electronic patient records system.
Patients spoken to by Express who have been at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in recent days report that the electronic outage is clearly making things harder for staff but do not feel that their treatment or care has been compromised.
One patient told Express: "I attended Accident and Emergency over the weekend. The staff at reception were keeping written records as the computer system was down.
"I was seen promptly. The on-call doctor couldn’t access my records, but fortunately I had the relevant information on an email on my phone.
"The staff remarked the system had been down for almost a week. The staff were getting on with things despite the very obvious inconvenience."
Pictured: The States are assuring visitors to the Accident and Emergency Department and other patients that their health and care remain paramount and that services are being maintained despite widespread problems with key electronic record systems.
The States said yesterday that they were focused on trying to resolve the problems with the electronic system and would provide further information only once it was restored.
They said the current position remains unchanged since the end of last week, when they released the following statement:
"We are currently experiencing issues with some of our core systems, including our patient management system. Restoring these systems is receiving the highest level of attention.
"We have business continuity plans in place for such an outage, which ensures services can be maintained for patients across all operational areas.
"The outage of our patient management system does, however, place an increased burden on staff as our teams need to manually gather relevant patient information. We thank them for their continued efforts and commitment to delivering the best care for patients, which remains...our top priority. We hope our systems will be restored shortly."
Pictured: The States are currently making preparations for a multi-million pound replacement system for keeping patients' electronic records.
The States' IT partner, Agilisys, said: "Agilisys is working with local, UK and third-party partners to restore systems in [HSC].
"The restoration of these systems is our number one priority at this time. The States are working on a programme to replace these systems in [HSC] and a procurement process is underway as part of that workstream."
In September 2021, it was announced that the new electronic system should be fully in place by 2024 after the Committee for Health & Social Care appointed IMS Maxims as its preferred supplier after an 18-month procurement process.
Paperless system 'My eHealth' to join together HSC, MSG and others
Urgent replacement of "vital" health system
Comments
Comments on this story express the views of the commentator only, not Bailiwick Publishing. We are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any of those comments.