Dick blames major software failure
A FAILURE within the state’s electronic medical records system could continue for several days but health authorities have moved to assure Townsville patients that they won’t be affected.
Health Minister Cameron Dick confirmed the issue yesterday affected five hospitals – the Princess Alexandra and the Lady Cilento Children’s hospitals in Brisbane and Cairns Base, Mackay and Townsville hospitals.
The eHealth failure, described in an internal email obtained by the Bulletin as a “major incident”, resulted in Cairns Hospital on Wednesday declaring a Code Yellow, which means “internal emergency”.
The Bulletin understands action was not required at Townsville Hospital yesterday.
“All wards at The Townsville Hospital have access to the integrated electronic medical record and patient care is not being affected,” Townsville Hospital and Health Board chairman Tony Mooney said.
“There have been no appointment cancellations for outpatients or elective surgery and all other core services are continuing as usual.”
Mr Dick ( right) assured the public no patient’s safety had been compromised due to the “major software failure”.
He told State Parliament yesterday morning the ransomware attack, which had impacted personal computers and computer networks operated by private enterprise and governments across the world, had not resulted in any breaches to Queensland Health security.
“There’s been no closure of beds, no rescheduling of elective surgery and the only feedback we have so far is that 22 specialist outpatient appointments have been rescheduled at the PA hospital in Brisbane,” Mr Dick told reporters yesterday.
“So there might be some delay in the adm i s s i o n and discharge of patients but otherwise patients are safe and business continues.”
Mr Dick conceded the impact of logon issues could continue for several days and may result in some delays to patient admission or discharge.
Dr Richard Ashby from eHealth Queensland, is heading the team looking into the problems, which he said they hadn’t anticipated but could work around.
During Question Time for the final parliamentary sitting day of the week, Opposition health spokesman John- Paul Langbroek said the Palaszczuk Government had presided over another major IT bungle. “If it isn’t health payroll, it’s critical e- patient records crashing, sending the health system into meltdown at the Princess Alexandra, Lady Cilento, Cairns Base, Mackay and Townsville hospitals,” Mr Langbroek said. “Q u e e n s - landers can’t trust Labor to manage o u r h e a l t h s y s t e m when they can’t manage a simple IT security upgrade.” The Townsville Hospital discarded paper patient charts in early 2013 to go live with the digital storage of medical records. Previously, paper medical records were often duplicated across facilities with little to no information sharing. But new ieMRs mean critical patient information is immediately available when a patient presents at a Queensland Health facility.