Chamber and committees

Maternity and emergency services were maintained throughout the period disrupted by the IT incident.

Reduced auditing was in place due to the impact that such services have on systems performance. We are however reviewing this in light of the recent incident and will introduce appropriate and proportionate auditing in due course.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s statistics for “Outage” include incidents where systems remain fully available to users, but elements are undergoing maintenance or remedial activities. In the period 2 October to 3 December there have been 10 planned outages (all restricted to either individual applications or sites. All occurred either out of hours when no users dependent on the services, or by pre-arrangement such that no risk to services occurred). There have been four periods of unplanned partial/total individual server outages during the period under review. These ranged between five and 60 minutes and on none of these occasions were patient services disrupted. This must be placed within the context of an IT estate with over 400 applications, supporting 11 major hospitals, over 250 GP and Health Centres and 40,000 staff.

Native Windows Server Backup was not being used prior to the incident. Symantec Backup Exec was used to backup the domain controllers. It was Symantec Backup Exec which was used to recover Active Directory.

More than 10,000 patients were attended by medical staff during the IT failure of 1 October 2013. As there was variable access to both electronic and paper clinical notes throughout the incident it is not possible to quantify for how many patients clinical notes were not available in each case.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde regards its IT Information Systems as critical health infrastructure. Accordingly it would not be appropriate to put detailed systems documentation (especially Information Security) into the public domain.

Information processing has been completed. All national returns have been provided and all patient transactions processed. No business or patient data was lost.

(a) Domain Name requests had not been failing previous to the incident.

(b) Web filtering software was not brought online on the day of the incident and is not relevant to the incident of 1 October 2013.

The new Local Delivery Plan format, focusing on the 12 priority areas for action in the Routemap to the 2020 Vision for Health and Social Care, will give NHS boards the opportunity to set out the action they are taking to implement Neonatal Care in Scotland: A Quality Framework.

Considerable progress has already been made, with the vast majority of statements in Neonatal Care in Scotland: A Quality Framework already being met, and full implementation taking place over the next five to 10 years.

Discussions with NHS boards and managed clinical networks are underway to determine what the process will be for monitoring the implementation of Neonatal Care in Scotland: A Quality Framework. Once agreed with Ministers, the governance process will form part of this discussion.

Considerable progress has already been made, with the vast majority of statements in Neonatal Care in Scotland: A Quality Framework already being met, and full implementation taking place over the next five to 10 years.