{"id":264470,"date":"2026-02-02T21:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T21:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/264470\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T21:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T21:49:13","slug":"human-error-blamed-for-it-outage-at-ni-health-trust-that-led-to-1600-appointments-being-postponed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/264470\/","title":{"rendered":"Human error blamed for IT outage at NI health trust that led to 1,600 appointments being postponed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Encompass, which had only been operational for just over four months \u2013 since May 8 \u2013 went down for one working day on September 17, leading to around 1,600 patients\u2019 appointments<\/a> in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust to be rescheduled.<\/p>\n

Addressing the board of the Southern Health and Social Care (HSC) Trust last Thursday, Elaine Wilson, Director of Planning, Performance and Informatics, explained that she was now in a position to outline what had gone wrong on the day.<\/p>\n

She said an Incident Review Group that was set up to review the major incident has now presented its findings and recommendations.<\/p>\n

\"Southern<\/p>\n

Southern Health Trust director Elaine Wilson<\/p>\n

Independent group chair Professor Graham Evans, who was attending the meeting remotely, told board members: \u201cDigital transformation is not just about technology, it\u2019s about people, process and technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main technical root cause was reported as a human process error. An individual was working on some critical infrastructure, undertaking a process that had happened several times previously, but on this particular occasion was working on the active data centre, rather than the inactive data centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result of that, when the software change was applied, we had the resulting system outage.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman error does take place, but what we can do is put some checks and balances, some safety nets within our process, to minimise the chance of these things occurring again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very careful using my words to \u2018minimise\u2019 rather than \u2018prevent\u2019, because it\u2019s very difficult to completely eliminate human error, but the process and the recommendations that we\u2019ve come up with is to implement a second-stage review, a second pair of eyes where another person within that process can double-check that the actions that are about to be taken are the correct actions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd we believe, in this particular instance, working on critical infrastructure, that this step will minimise the risk of a reoccurrence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn addition, what we\u2019ve done working with vendors within the supply chain, is to implement better and strengthened chain controls.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, rather than reaching out to the supply partners during this process after the event, we want to be more proactive and involve them in the planning and preparation of critical infrastructure change.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second pair of eyes, [as well as] being more proactive, are really the key recommendations that have now been implemented, and will strengthen the learning as we go forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve also considered strengthening the Trust\u2019s governance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The launch of Encompass at Daisy Hill Hospital<\/p>\n

Prof Graham went on to praise all involved for being so focused on restoring the new IT system so quickly.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my experience of these types of situations, to get critical infrastructure back up and running within a business day was no mean feat,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a real, Herculean effort from all of the Trust, its partners, and during that time, there was a laser-light focus on patient safety and patient care.”<\/p>\n

Ms Wilson explained that lessons would be learned from the incident, and recommended measures fully implemented.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The IT outage affected some 1,600 appointments this week<\/p>\n

News catch up – Monday 2 February <\/p>\n

She told board members: \u201cWhile we have started with the implementation of the recommendations, they\u2019re not all complete, so we will be bringing an action plan to our senior leadership team to set out all the recommendations that were made, where we are in terms of the progress in implementing those, and what else we still need to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of them will take a little bit more time, but all the recommendations we will be taking forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things to mention in relation to the technical side of things, the technical recommendations, we have now implemented all of those.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Encompass, which had only been operational for just over four months \u2013 since May 8 \u2013 went down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,151074,527,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-264470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-trusts","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}