27 May 2023 , 21:17
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An untold number of people were left unable to see a medical professional on Friday after system failures.
The EMIS software, which is used in approximately half of GP surgeries, primary care facilities, dentists and community pharmacies in England, had outages for most of Friday.
This left doctors and other medical staff unable to access any medical records - meaning potentially tens of thousands of appointments were cancelled as doctors were unable to treat patients.
The system failure also meant practitioners couldn’t look at or order prescriptions or sick notes. The outages were reported by doctors up and down the country, with the Midlands and London especially affected.
Alistair Walling GP Partner at Ashfield Medical Centre in Leeds told The Mirror: “You can sort of do emergency care but you haven't got any access to records, you have to be very careful about what you prescribe and you can see to the acute stuff and then it all just builds up.”
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Dentist's surgeries were also hit by the software outage (Getty Images)This comes right before a bank holiday weekend and school’s half term, when demand is expected to rise even further with fewer staff.
Dr Walling told The Mirror that on the Friday before a bank holiday his practice puts on more staff than usual but “we've had doctors doing very little, which sounds silly. Because there's nothing we've had a locum at £80 an hour who was doing nothing - it's been a nightmare”.
GPs report that although this isn’t a common occurrence, the system has become increasingly slower and harder to use. When it has happened before, doctors say it’s just for an hour or two, never affecting a whole day’s clinic. Similar problems were reported with the other major clinical system in England TTP just a few weeks ago.
The problem is being linked to the fact that the NHS has given the contracts for the vast amount of GP surgeries computer systems to just two providers.
“There's just two providers, no need for competition and interest in trying to encourage new people to come into the market to create competition and patients are affected,” Dr Walling says.
He also thinks that the quick overturn of new Health Secretaries has meant that guidelines for new systems have been forgotten.
Ashfield Medical Centre would usually have seen up to 150 patients on Friday, but Dr Walling says they’ve been able to see less than 20 because of the system failures.
Dr Walling does impress that triage was done and everyone who was a clear medical emergency was directed to help “but we've got to take that with a pinch of salt and some of those people [who weren’t seen] will be worse off for not being seen today.”
The Department of Health was contacted for a comment but has not responded.