Clinics cancelled as Waikato DHB plans for new week with cyber attack hangover
Sunday, 23 May 2021
Waikato DHB is cancelling a number of speciality outpatient clinics as they continue to grapple with a crippling cyber attack.
Chief executive Kevin Snee and executive director hospital and community services Chris Lowry gave an update on Sunday.
They said it was necessary to cancel a number of speciality outpatient clinics, with a list of cancelled clinics available on the DHB website.
It’s now been six days since malware, believed to have breached hospital IT systems through an email attachment, brought down both computer and phone systems at all Waikato DHB hospitals.
**READ MORE:
* Cyber attack at Waikato hospitals: Services down until at least next week
* Health hacks and IT issues: a walk through past cyber woes at Waikato DHB
* Cyber attack sends Waikato DHB cancer patients to Auckland for radiation therapy
**
The attack left staff scrambling and resorting to pen and paper and in some cases running prescriptions and test results in person to wards as many operations were delayed.
Laboratory and radiology were the two most affected services, Lowry said.
The DHB would continue to provide elective surgery, however they would be reviewing what had been booked to ensure the services could cope with the workload, she said.
They were still facing challenges with their clinics as they knew the number of clinics booked and the number of patients, but they didn't have access to the names of the patients who had been booked in.
However, for clinic patients they could go back through their electronic referral system to find the patients' referral letter, which would have clinical information on it relevant to their visit, Lowry said.
There had been two patients transferred to other hospitals to receive radiation therapy and Lowry said she was not aware of any patients who had been diverted to other hospitals by ambulance.
She knew that some DHBs on the periphery were referring people to other tertiary centres, and gave an example of Taranaki referring cardiology patients to Wellington.
Rescue helicopters were only taking patients who were time-critical to Waikato Hospital.
In the past 24 hours 202 people had sought treatment at Waikato Hospital’s emergency department, which was slightly higher than recent experience.
“However, this is still about 75 percent of normal activity.
“Staff were able to manage the workload, however we are still encouraging the public to keep all of our emergency departments for emergencies only.”
Lowry said the community had responded well to messages over the last few days, but the longer time went on the more the public thought services were resuming.
“It’s still a challenge for our emergency department staff.
“Everything is manual. We do have the ability now to access the national system for patient numbers, but everything else is manual.
“It’s the ability to manage the patient and track what’s happening with the patient that takes longer.”
She said accessing relevant clinical information would still be a challenge in this coming week.
There would be a phased approach to restore the systems and Snee said they were focussed on bringing back services that were of the highest clinical priority first.
The DHB does have back up files, which is what they were using to rebuild the system, but Snee wasn’t able to give a clear timeline as to when everything would be back up and running as normal.
“Even when we are back up running fully we will still be in quite a recovery period afterwards, because there are a lot of things to enter that are now in writing, [and] there is patient information that will need to be entered in the system.”
They were planning for the recovery phase of the operation, which would included re-booking patients and setting up a process for entering patient information manually into their systems
Extra staff would need to be hired to input this data, they confirmed on Sunday.
Snee said on Saturday they had insurance for this purpose, but were cataloguing the cost, and it would only become clear in the aftermath how much it was all going to cost.
The main number for external enquiries to Waikato DHB and the main hospital number are operational, but high volumes may mean some waiting, and if calls do drop out people are encouraged to call back.
To avoid unnecessary travel to Waikato Hospital all patients should call to confirm their appointment is going ahead.