Hospital staff forced to use whiteboards and pen and paper for patient notes after IT outage

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IT systems at Christchurch Hospital went down after a problem at an external data centre. (File photo)

ALDEN WILLIAMS/The Press

IT systems at Christchurch Hospital went down after a problem at an external data centre. (File photo)

Christchurch Hospital staff were forced to write patient notes on whiteboards and use pen and paper after a major IT outage.

Hospital’s systems host at an external data centre were experiencing instability due to a “switch fault” on Wednesday evening, said Canterbury incident controller for Te Whatu Ora Becky Hickmott.

“Inbound and outbound messaging is intermittent, and some online applications used by our frontline staff are also experiencing intermittent outages. Our teams are closely monitoring patient care.

“We have systems in place for outages occurring, and our teams are following business continuity plans, using paper and manual backups,” Hickmott said.

Staff were also using paper prescriptions for the pharmacy and text messaging, and Microsoft Teams systems were being used to communicate with other staff.

It comes a few months after an hour-long power failure due to a network outage left some areas of the hospital in total darkness.

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