By Tony Collins
The NHS e-Referral Service which launched nationally on Monday was “unavailable until further notice”, the Health and Social Care Information Centre said at 9.30am today.
“Due to issues experienced overnight the NHS e-Referral Service is unavailable until further notice while essential maintenance is performed. If you have local business continuity processes available, we recommend that you consider invoking them,” says the HSCIC on its website.
“We are working hard to resolve these issues as quickly as possible and to keep disruption to a minimum… We apologise for the disruption caused to some users and thank everyone for their patience.”
Late yesterday afternoon the Health and Social Care Information Centre warned GPs and other users of its e-Referral Service that technical problems were continuing.
The difficulties have aggravated cynicism in the GP community about the ability of centrally-based officials to implement national IT systems.
Is it too soon to question whether e-Referrals is the first IT disaster of the new government? There is also the question of whether GPs have been used as guinea pigs to test for problems with the new system.
Until the service went down GPs were in any case unable to log in or were experiencing long delays in arranging referrals. Some reverted to sending letters by post – or always did use the post and avoided the NPfIT Choose and Book system which e-Referral is replacing.
Fewer than 60% of GPs used Choose and Book to hospital appointments for patients.
On its website at 17.30 yesterday the HSCIC said:
“PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO COLLEAGUES WHO USE THE NHS e-REFERRAL SERVICE
“The NHS e-Referral Service has been used by patients and professionals today to complete bookings and referrals comparable with the number on a typical Tuesday but we were continuing to see on-going performance and stability issues after yesterday’s fixes.
“We suspend access to the system at lunchtime today to implement another fix and this improved performance and stability in the afternoon.
“We are continuing to monitor the service and will implement further fixes if required. If users notice any further issues they should log them with their local service desk in the usual way…
“We apologise for the disruption caused to some users and thank everyone for their patience.
Update 14.00 17 June
The Health and Social Care Information Centre said the e-Referral Service was still down.
“HSCIC are completing the final stage of testing a number of fixes to the NHS e-Referrals Service. It is hoped that the service will be available again later today. A further update will be issued at 15:00 today.”
Update 18.00 17 June
Said the HSCIC:
“The NHS e-Referrals Service is now available again. We apologise for the disruption caused to users and thank everyone for their patience.
Update 15.00 18 June – ongoing problems
“Yesterday’s outage enabled us to implement a number of improvements and hopefully this is reflected in your user experience today,” said HSCIC’s website.
“This morning users reported that there were ongoing performance issues so work has now taken place to implement changes to the configuration to the NHS e-Referral Service hardware and we are currently monitoring closely to see if this resolved the issue.”
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