'Absolute chaos' as GP practices across England hit by EMIS outage

GP practices across England faced ‘chaos' on 4 November after an EMIS IT system outage cut off access to appointment booking systems and left clinicians unable to see patient records.

EMIS is the most widely-used GP practice IT system in England, in use at more than half of practices across the country - and practices as far apart as London, Cheshire and Bristol were reporting an outage on the morning of Monday 4 November.

Dr Selvaseelan Selvarajah, a GP at St Andrews Health Centre in East London told GPonline that staff first flagged the issue at around 7.30am on 4 November.  He said: ‘We came in this morning, it worked for a few seconds and then there was the wheel of doom. We restarted the system a few times and it still did not work, then we raised it with the EMIS team.’

Dr Selvarajah added: ‘Mondays are always busy but this has been chaotic. It is a patient safety issue too, because we have a complex issue of not being able to access medications and hospital letters. EMIS told us that it is unavailable for some users and they are treating it as a high priority issue.' He said that from what he had heard, GP practices across the country had been affected.

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Source: GP Online, 4 November 2024