Patients attending the Emergency Department, outpatient and other appointments at Letterkenny University Hospital are facing significant delays today as the impact of the cyber attack on the HSE continues to affect the delivery of hospital services.
Although progress has been made to get priority systems back up and running including radiology, diagnostic/laboratory and patient information systems, many of the supporting systems are still being worked on.
The Saolta Hospital Group says many manual processes are in place at Letterkenny University Hospital for example ordering X-rays and laboratory tests and also for getting results back.
The hospital’s email system hasn’t been restored which is making communication between different areas of the hospital and outside the hospital more difficult and also much slower.
Seán Murphy, Hospital Manager says there are around 80 different interconnected IT systems in use at the hospital making it a complex process to restore with the workarounds in place in the meantime are slowing us down.
A high number of appointments have been cancelled at the hospital since the attack on the HSE.
Patients are advised to attend appointments if called and patients attending the Emergency Department are facing extremely long delays because essential services like blood tests and diagnostic services are taking much longer than usual, subsequently increasing turnaround times.
People are again, advised to contact their GP or GP Out Of Hours Service in the first instance if their health problem is not urgent.
