Another ambulance service declares critical incident after IT outage

South East Coast Ambulance Service Foundation Trust said this morning it had suffered a “significant IT issue overnight”. It confirmed it was facing “network issues affecting a number of systems including our CAD [computer aided dispatch system]” and is asking patients to “consider alternatives to 999”.

The trust has implemented contingency plans, it said, and was continuing to respond to patients.

In a message sent to staff at around 9am this morning, trust strategic commander John Griffiths said: “The network failure means that the majority of our IT systems remain unavailable currently and we are running the CAD on paper from Coxheath [one of the trust’s emergency operations centres].”

He asked all corporate staff to work from home if possible rather than going into the trust’s headquarters in Crawley. 

However, ambulance staff have told HSJ that the issue was a “clusterf***”. The CAD issues were “really hampering” responses to category 1 calls – the most urgent – with information being received from the emergency operations centre and then input into satnavs with “endless bits of paper around the cab.” There was a risk of multiple resources being sent to the same caller, one added.

The outage follows an apparently similar incident suffered by East of England Ambulance Service Trust last week. As first reported by HSJ, the trust also had problems with its CAD and telephony systems, forcing it to reroute emergency calls to other ambulance trusts, and with crews on the road having to telephone in with any problems.

The CAD failure meant the control room was unable to see where crews were, raising patient and crew safety concerns.