Trust seeks compensation after IT crash hits cancer services

Gloucestershire Hospitals Foundation Trust is still waiting for its picture archive communication system (PACS) to be fully operational again six months after the upgrade caused “technical issues”, according to the trust.

The PACS is provided by Philips, a major supplier of imaging software to the NHS – with the system upgrade part of a wider tech programme to digitise the trust.

The problems began shortly after the upgrade was carried out during the transition and implementation phase, with more issues emerging due to the system not being “robust enough”, according to minutes from the trust’s September board meeting.

The most affected services were radiology reporting and breast screening, with the incident causing the loss of up to 35 per cent of the trust’s breast screening productivity. This led to clinicians having to “run longer clinics to maintain capacity and keep 100 per cent [performance] on two-week suspected cancer waits”, according to the minutes.

Staff were able to access the PACS software during the outage, albeit this had to be done through the electronic patient record which took longer and was more complicated.

Additionally, the trust had to outsource radiology reporting to an external supplier in order to maintain performance.

The trust’s board papers stated no incidents of harm to patients had been identified.

However, the incident has led to the trust telling Philips it had triggered “contractual recompense for the costs incurred to date”, and it was “retaining legal advice”.

The trust did not say how much compensation it was seeking from Philips.

Helen Ainsbury, interim chief digital and information officer at the trust, said: “As with any system upgrade of this complexity it was a very challenging piece of work which involved considerable planning and implementation.

“The trust and Philips have worked incredibly hard to resolve the problems and following their work the system is more stable, with final improvements in progress.

“An enhanced monitoring process has been instigated and no harm has been identified to patients, but increased vigilance continues.”

A Philips spokeswoman said: “We continually upgrade and further future-proof the Philips’ PACS solutions.

“After a recent transfer to an upgraded system at one of our customers, Philips became aware of some technical issues during the transition and installation process.

“We regret the inconvenience this issue had caused for our customer.”

The spokeswoman declined to say whether Philips would recompense the trust, when the PACS would be fully operational again, and whether the system upgrade has caused issues at any other trusts.