NHS data centre repairs "almost complete"

Most repairs to computer services in 80 hospital trusts that were downed by a power cut earlier this week are complete, the NHS has reported.

Yesterday IT experts from CSC and its sub-contractor, Hitachi, were working round the clock to restore access to data centres affected by a power supply interruption.

In a statement today, NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) said: "We can report the recovery of computer services in the North West and West Midlands of England is now largely complete. This follows an interruption to the computer services provided by CSC Alliance due to an interruption to the power supply at the data centre where data is stored.

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"Over the course of today it is planned that all systems will be restored and services will again be available to the NHS. Of the 80 affected trusts and PCTs [primary care trusts] across the region, only two organisations do not yet have a system available to them. Efforts are now being concentrated on restoring services to these two trusts by later today."

The NHS said while it will be testing the systems before they go live again, it expects them to be available later today.

It said: "To date no impact on the delivery of patient care has been reported."

During the downtime, hospital staff have been using paper systems until their computer systems are restored.

Earlier this week the NHS CfH said that it and supplier CSC "regret the inconvenience this incident is causing and are working to deliver fully restored services".

It said the incident was caused by storage area network equipment failure, which has also hit several other organisations using the affected CSC Maidstone data centre.