Despite some progress in solving the HSE cyber hack, there continues to be widespread appointment cancellations in the mid-west.
UL Hospitals Group, which oversees six hospitals including UHL and Nenagh General, says all outpatient clinics remain cancelled, as well as elective inpatient and day-case procedures.
10,000 patients have now had scheduled appointments or procedures cancelled since the attack on May 14th.
Dr Joe Kelly is Consultant in Emergency Medicine at UL Hospitals Group:
“We continue to struggle with the after-effects of the cyber attack and ongoing issues around accessibility and stability of our IT systems have slowed down our processes in the department. This is resulting in delays at almost every step of the patient journey, from registration to seeing a nurse or a doctor; from getting an X-ray done to the results of a blood test becoming available. We have set up workarounds to keep our patients safe but our work has slowed down considerably and we expect to be suffering the effects of this hack for a number of weeks to come.
“It is vital that people who do need the ED continue to come such as suspected heart attacks, strokes, other serious illnesses or accidents. People with less serious injury or illness can expect to experience delays and we would ask them to consider the alternatives to ED where that is appropriate,” Dr Kelly said.
Patients attending our Emergency Department or Injury Units are advised to bring any information with them that will assist our staff while our IT systems are down. This could be any document or record which includes the patients Medical Record Number (MRN) or Patient Chart Number (PCN). This information is usually on a sticker on hospital documentation, or on medications or prescriptions, or any hospital discharge information from a previous time spent in hospital.
