Serious questions need to be asked about IT budget at Cork hospital

It is with great interest I have been following the recent IT crash at CUH. Was their IT infrastructure tested to cope with  additional workload as the hospital expanded? 

Was the IT infrastructure  tested to ensure that the additional functions being obtained from other hospitals could be coped with by their IT infrastructure? Was there a significant budget allocated to allow for the upgrade of the IT infrastructure within CUH? Have CUH an adequate disaster recovery plan to allow the hospital recover from and protect business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster such as what has now taken place? Has this disaster recovery plan ever been tested? If  the answer to all of these questions is no, then why not? And if the answer is yes, can the hospital release the results of these tests to independent IT experts who can assess the vulnerabilities within the IT infrastructure?

As the largest university hospital in the country, CUH has a duty of care towards the most vulnerable in society. Patients have to wait longer than average for test results and this does not form a good opinion of the hospital in the minds of the public or patients. Waiting to obtain the results of a test can be the most stressful period for a patient.

Having to manually check records for each patient to ensure accuracy does not install confidence in the hospital's IT infrastructure. This is not alone a drain on budgets and resources,  that could be used elsewhere within the hospital,  but manual verification of records is more open to error. There is a high possibility of misdiagnosing a patient. However, a verification process can be devised to ensure accuracy.

Not alone must CUH have the best staff in the country operating at the hospital, they must also have the best IT infrastructure . Is their IT infrastructure audited by an independent team? If so can the results of this audit be released to the public on a yearly basis?

Before further expansions take place within CUH, stress testing should be undertaken to ensure that their IT infrastructure is capable to cope with the expansion. I believe there are lessons for all other hospitals in Ireland that want to expand in a similar method to CUH.

One would need to ask would this happen in a private hospital and how tolerant would their patients be to such an IT disaster?

It might be time that our new Health Minister issued some guidelines and standards for  IT infrastructure within our country’s main hospitals so we can prevent such an incident from happening again. Patients within CUH deserve the best clinical care  and the IT infrastructure within CUH at the moment does not appear to be capable of delivering on this front.

Maitias O Luasaigh

5 Hillcourt

Donnybrook Hill

Douglas