Hospital IT outage affected 34 appointments

Twenty-four outpatient and 10 elective surgery appointments were rescheduled within a week

IT issues at the hospital last month meant 34 appointments had to be rescheduled, Jersey's Health Minister has said.

Deputy Tom Binet said a third party software update was the cause of the problem but could not confirm specific details.

Business continuity plans were implemented to maintain patient safety and services during the incident on Friday 23 February.

Mr Binet said work was being done to identify the "root cause of the problem".

He was responding to concerns raised in a letter by the Health and Social Security Scrutiny Panel.

He said the software update that caused the incident was stopped from running on the Friday afternoon and that "resulted in an immediate improvement".

The letter said there were no reported incidents of patient harm.

Twenty-four outpatient and 10 elective surgery appointments were rescheduled by the following Thursday.

Deputy Binet said officers from Health and Community Services and are working with the third-party to examine a systems diagnostic data.

"I will share the results of the ongoing investigation, any mitigation plans and an analysis of the impact this incident had on patient care with the Panel at the earliest opportunity" he said.