Initial progress has been made to restore some hospital services at Letterkenny University Hospital following the ransomware attack on the HSE IT systems.
Seán Murphy, General Manager at Letterkenny University Hospital said, “Work is ongoing to get essential systems such as radiology, diagnostic/laboratory and patient information back functioning fully.
“Even though we do not have all systems back, we are in a position to resume a limited number of services this week on a phased basis.
“On Thursday and Friday we will go ahead with some planned surgery and patients are being contacted directly. We are also recommencing a number of outpatient clinics and patients are being contacted directly if their appointments are going ahead.
“We have been able to keep our maternity services, dialysis appointments, physiotherapy appointments and most chemotherapy treatments going throughout the IT systems outage and patients should continue to come to their appointments for these services.
“Unfortunately patients attending the Emergency Department are still facing extremely long delays because essential services like blood tests and diagnostic services are taking much longer than usual.
“This has been an extremely difficult time for the many patients who have been impacted by cancellations. We are working to reschedule the cancelled appointments as soon as possible. This will take time particularly as the systems are still not back to a level that will allow us to resume normal service. I would like to thank all our patients and their families for their support and understanding throughout these disruptions and delays.
“I would like to acknowledge the incredible commitment of the staff in the hospital, many of whom have been working long hours and throughout the weekends, to come up with work arounds to help us keep the hospital going and are now working to restore services and update the systems with all the manual records from the past three weeks. They undertook this huge effort to enable this level of patient care to resume much earlier than expected.”
Overview of current hospital services:
LIMITED SERVICE FROM 03 JUNE
· Outpatient clinics will resume on a phased basis and patients are being contacted by the hospital if their appointment is going ahead.
· Diagnostics including x-ray, CT scans, MRI appointments will resume on a phased basis and patients are being contacted by the hospital if their appointment is going ahead.
· Elective inpatient and day case procedures, including endoscopy – a number of procedures are going ahead and patients are being contacted directly.
SERVICES CONTINUING
· Maternity services including antenatal scanning
· Dialysis
· Chemotherapy
· Physiotherapy
INR CLINIC
Patients who are taking warfarin medication and have concerns about checking their INR are asked to telephone 074 910 4473 between 10am and 12noon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for advice.
Ongoing updates on service disruptions will be provided on hse.ie and on saolta.ie.
