Greater Manchester hospitals declare critical incident over IT glitch

Royal Oldham Hospital's A&E department is among the sites affected

A major IT failure is causing severe delays for patients at four hospitals in Greater Manchester.

Royal Oldham Hospital, North Manchester General, Rochdale Infirmary and Fairfield in Bury are affected by the outage, the Northern Care Alliance NHS Trust said.

People have been asked to attend A&E only in the most urgent scenarios.

Hospital appointments including planned surgery and outpatient clinics are running as normal, the trust said.

Patients should continue to attend unless they are contacted directly and told otherwise.

Dr Chris Brookes, the trust's chief medical officer, apologised for the disruption and said "robust contingency plans" were in place.

"Patient safety and maintaining essential services remains our priority," he said.

"We are doing everything we can to fix the IT issues and to limit disruption to patients and our services.

"However, unfortunately some patients may experience some delays and additional waiting across some of our services such as outpatient appointments, diagnostic tests or scans. We apologise for this."

The trust said the problems first emerged on 18 May and hospitals were having to use some paper-based processes and record keeping.

All patient records and personal data remain secure and unaffected, the trust added.