Hospital in meltdown over IT issues

A whistleblower has warned a London hospital is "literally in meltdown" after its IT system was knocked out during last week's heatwave.

Operations at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth were cancelled after its IT servers broke down in 40C (104F) temperatures on 19 July.

A doctor told the BBC "poor planning" and "chronic underfunding" meant issues remained a week later.

A spokesperson for the hospital said IT issues were "having an ongoing impact".

Without a functioning IT system, staff have returned to paper notes, the doctor said.

The anonymous whistleblower, who works as a doctor at Guy's and St Thomas', said this meant "we see very worrying results, but we don't know where the patients are so we spend ages tracking them down".

"We cannot read any historical notes from patients. Names are being misspelt, so scans are not showing up.

"Each morning, someone hand-delivers a stack of test results to the ward. In there, we received several patient results that don't belong to our ward," the doctor said.

"If we don't recover our shared drives, we risk losing months of research data, if not years."

Read full story

Source: BBC News, 27 July 2022