Guy's and St Thomas': Hospitals in meltdown over IT issues - whistleblower

IT servers at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital stopped working during last week's heatwave

A whistleblower has warned a London hospital is "literally in meltdown" after its IT system was knocked out during last week's heatwave.

Operations at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals in south London were cancelled after IT servers broke down in 40C (104F) temperatures on 19 July.

A doctor told the BBC "poor planning" and "chronic underfunding" meant issues remained a week later.

A spokesperson for the hospital said IT issues were "having an ongoing impact".

Without a functioning IT system, staff have returned to paper notes, the doctor said.

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The anonymous whistleblower, who works as a doctor at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, said this meant "we see very worrying results, but we don't know where the patients are so we spend ages tracking them down".

"We cannot read any historical notes from patients. Names are being misspelt, so scans are not showing up.

"Each morning, someone hand-delivers a stack of test results to the ward. In there, we received several patient results that don't belong to our ward," the doctor said.

"If we don't recover our shared drives, we risk losing months of research data, if not years."

'Affecting mental health'

The labs have apparently borne the brunt of the software failure.

"We spend hours trying to get through to the lab for urgent blood results, but there is such a backlog and time-sensitive results are impossible to interpret," the whistleblower told the BBC.

The BBC spoke to a second doctor, Jamie Wallis, a GP in Waterloo, who said their practice "still can't request routine blood tests or urine cultures".

"The hospital struggles to see patients and some patients are therefore not being called," the GP added.

Stephanie Andrews said she had to wait four weeks to be told she was cancer-free

Patients have reported the broken IT system is affecting their mental health.

Claire, 48, told the BBC she had been waiting a week for the results of her biopsy on a potentially cancerous growth.

"I've called every day, and no one has called me back to explain," she said. "With the chaos that comes out of this, I don't want to slip through the net. It's hard on my mental health."

Stephanie Andrews said it took nearly a month to be told she was cancer-free after having surgery.

"With cancer, time is of the essence," she said. Ms Andrews was told the broken IT system meant the hospital "couldn't even access my phone number to call me to cancel" an appointment last week.

Earlier this year, an internal report outlined that Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust's IT infrastructure "had reached the end of its life".

'Ongoing impact'

"The trust until today has not been upfront with us," the whistleblower said. "The leading hospital in London is literally in a meltdown."

"It's not as if they didn't know a heatwave was coming. Other, less well-resourced, district hospitals are functioning absolutely fine.

"It's sad that the people right opposite us at the Houses of Parliament are too busy fighting over other things than to help us with our crisis."

A spokesperson for Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust said: "We continue to respond to significant IT problems on our sites, which is having an ongoing impact on our services.

"While the majority of appointments have gone ahead, unfortunately we have had to postpone some operations and appointments."

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