NHS recovery crank-started

Suppliers' disaster relief promised

By Mark Ballard • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 1st August 2006 10:48 GMT

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CSC Alliance, the supplier responsible for the outage of patient administration systems across 80 NHS bodies, has promised it will have 50 of them up and running again by midday, over two days after they went down.

Problems with a storage area networking system at a data centre in Maidstone, Kent, at 10am Sunday morning left 72 Primary Care and 8 Acute NHS Trusts without patient administration systems, according to Connecting for Health (CfH), the Department for Health body that governs NHS IT provision.

A spokesman from CSC said: "The situation at the moment is that 50 trusts will be up and running by noon today. They've gone into disaster recovery mode."

He could not comment on the speed at which CSC's disaster recovery plans had restored its NHS customers' service after it went down on Sunday. But CfH said in a statement yesterday: "The nature of the incident meant that service could not immediately be provided by the back-up systems, also provided by CSC Alliance."

CSC's patient administration service is used by hospitals and other care centres to book appointments for admissions, theatre bookings and so on. No data was said to be lost. ®

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