What went wrong with IT failures at Greater Manchester's major hospitals - and how patients could suffer because of them

The true scale of harm caused to patients by massive IT failures across four of the region’s major hospitals for weeks is yet to reveal itself, NHS trust bosses have said. The admission comes as the chiefs share the root cause of the outages which forced the hospitals to move from an IT system to a paper system for days.

NHS staff told the Manchester Evening News that thousands of patients were being affected by delays to care, caused by a major IT failure across four hospitals in Greater Manchester back in May. The IT issues caused chaos with electronic prescribing, viewing patients’ medical records, finding test results - as well forcing appointments and surgeries to be cancelled.

IT experts had to be flown in from the United States of America to work on the fix. Meanwhile, patients who had waited for months for treatment, including cancer surgeries, arrived at hospital to find out their procedure would no longer be going ahead.

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On May 17, the IT system used in A&Es across Greater Manchester became unresponsive. By the next morning, it became clear that the issue was ‘affecting most clinical systems’ in Fairfield General, Rochdale Infirmary, the Royal Oldham Hospital and North Manchester General Hospital, according to board papers put to a meeting of the Northern Care Alliance (NCA) NHS Foundation Trust today (July 25).

More than a week of outages saw staff forced to work on paper, sharing concerns with the M.E.N. that they were ‘losing patients in hospital’ as they could not track their movements from A&E onto wards electronically. The IT failures prompted critical incidents and business continuity