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London Ambulance IT system hit by three outages in last year

Patient is suspected to have died while system was down

The IT system responsible for dispatching ambulances across London has been hit by three outages in the last year, it has emerged.

CommandPoint is responsible for ensuring ambulances reach their destination within eight minutes of a call for high-priority emergencies such as cardiac arrests.

But that system went down for five hours on New Year's day, forcing the service's control room to log all emergency calls by pen and paper.

The London Ambulance Service said it is investigating whether the outage led to a patient death.

Director of operations Paul Woodrow said: "We are taking this incident very seriously and have now launched a full external investigation into the circumstances of what happened and any impact on our patients.

"As part of our investigation we have identified a patient who sadly died during the time of the computer issues where we would like to look more closely at whether this was potentially a contributory factor. We have launched a separate investigation to establish this."

He said that the control room staff are fully trained in using a manual back-up system and continued to prioritise patients in the same way, using the same assessment process as usual.

Following the outage, minister of state at the Department of Health Philip Dunne was asked how many times the CommandPoint system has failed following the recent outage.

He said: "The Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system at London Ambulance Service has experienced outages on three occasions in the last 12 months. Following the most recent outage, an investigation is ongoing in order to determine a clear cause."

US security firm Northrop Grumman won the contract to provide the CAD system to the London Ambulance service in 2008, which was rolled out in 2012.

CommandPoint is a .NET-based piece of kit running on Windows Server and Unix-powered machines.

The Register has asked The London Ambulance Service and Northrop Grumman for a comment. ®

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