One of the country’s largest hospitals warned of the danger of a “catastrophic technical failure” of their computer systems after an IT glitch caused chaos during the summer.
The Mater Hospital was hit by a failure of their patient record computer system in July which led to the cancellation of surgeries and a plea to the public not to attend its emergency department.
A report prepared in the aftermath said the hospital’s PatientCare records system was beyond “end of life” with no technical support available for critical elements.
It said: “Services were affected for the entirety of the outage; this included an unknown level of harm to the patients.
“No assurance can be given that [the] system will not fail at any point into the future. Furthermore, if the failure is in one of the unsupported elements of the system, the failure may be unrecoverable.”
The report detailed how July’s IT outage left the hospital exposed as medics were forced to revert to the use of paper files without access to electronic records.
It said that sixty procedures – including thirty-two surgeries – had to be deferred including “time sensitive urgent care.”
The report added: “Support for outsourcing surgical activity in the private hospital system was denied by the HSE.”
Asked about the outage, a spokeswoman said: “[The hospital] worked as quickly as possible to rectify the situation, but some patients were affected, which the Mater Hospital regrets and apologises for.
“The hospital has been working for some time with the HSE to update and replace the existing ICT system and it is now part of the programme to introduce a new National Electronic Health record.
“Pending that new system being in place, the Mater Hospital has instigated a range of measures to mitigate against future systems failures.”