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Update: Crash hits 80 NHS trusts
Priority services back online but others may take until Thursday...

By Steve Ranger

Published: Tuesday 01 August 2006

Computer services are now being restored to 80 hospital trusts in the North West and West Midlands, hit by problems when the power supply to a data centre was interrupted.

NHS Connecting for Health (CfH), the agency responsible for health service IT, said some priority services were restored last night, and "a number" of the 80 affected trusts and primary care trusts across the region have had use of their patient administration system restored from the start of business today.

It said more trusts' systems have become operational during the morning and this number will build up throughout the day.

CfH said in a statement: "It is expected that all trusts in the region will have fully operational administration systems by early on Thursday."

In the meantime, hospital staff will use paper systems until their computer systems are restored.

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

The agency said services provided by CSC Alliance for the NHS in the North West and West Midlands had suffered "serious interruption" since 10:00(BST) on 30 July.

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.

CfH said "technical issues" following power system interruptions mean data held on computers in the central data centre for the region could not be accessed.

A statement from CfH said: "The nature of the incident meant service could not immediately be provided by the back-up systems, also provided by CSC Alliance. No data has been lost."

Experts from CSC and its sub-contractor Hitachi have been working round the clock to restore access to data.