IT problems cause chaos at hospital

Dereham Hospital has been left in chaos after computer problems which left patient records inaccessible.

People were turning up to appointments which staff had no record of and their patient notes could not be accessed.

The problems ran from last Thursday to Monday, with a further breakdown of the system on Wednesday this week.

The problems were initially blamed on SystmOne, part of the new national IT system which has been rolled out to Dereham Hospital in the last few weeks. But NHS Norfolk, which runs the community hospital, said this was not the case and blamed a BT fault. 

The community hospital has 24 rehabilitation beds and provides outpatient physiotherapy to a wide area of mid and north Norfolk.

The outpatient services were worst hit, with wards less dependent on computers.

One member of staff, who did not want to be named, said: "There is total chaos. Because of the new computer system we were told to get rid of all paperwork and rely 100pc on the computer system. Patients are turning up and physiotherapists don't know what they are there for because they can't look at the notes. They don't know when people are due to turn up.  Patients are reacting very badly, as you would."

A spokesman from NHS Norfolk said: "NHS Norfolk can confirm that there was an issue with the computer systems at Dereham Hospital.

However, while the SystmOne computer system was affected, it was not the cause. 

"The issue was caused by a BT network failure, which both BT engineers and NHS engineers worked together to correct.

"During the period when computer systems were unavailable, a back-up paper system contingency plan was used to keep patient disruption to a minimum. Every attempt was made to ensure that the patients were not inconvenienced by the delay in processing their details and patient safety was maintained."