Brighton to recreate IT crash

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is recreating its IT crash last month in a lab environment to figure out exactly what went wrong.  

EHI reported last week that the trust declared a major incident after it lost access to clinical IT systems for five hours and was forced to re-route ambulances to other hospitals.

After the incident occurred, the trust worked 24/7 to get everything running again and to isolate the cause.

A trust spokesperson told EHI it will now recreate the incident in order to figure out why it happened.

“Whilst the issue has been isolated, the trust continues to work with HP and Cisco partners to enable the root cause of the issue to be recreated in a lab environment,” said the trust spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that the reason for the IT infrastructure problems was a part of the network being put “under extreme load”.

“Unfortunately, this made access to some core systems from some departments unreliable,” said the spokesperson.

“During this time most servers remained operational and most users still had access to the PAS, however access to some other systems including pathology systems were impacted.”

At the time, the trust’s chief executive Matthew Kershaw said that the problem “could not be predicted or prevented, it just happened.”

According to EHI Intelligence, the trust runs HP servers and its WAN network is provided by Cisco.

Brighton and Sussex went live with its Alert electronic patient record system in its eye hospital last December, but revised its further deployment to focus on a “core set of functionality”.

It also delayed its deployment in the Princess Royal Hospital, where it is due to go live this month. A spokesperson from the trust told EHI the go-live will “not be impacted by this outage”.