Box Hill, Maroondah and Ferntree Gully hospitals hit by alarming IT outages
Box Hill, Maroondah and Ferntree Gully hospitals have been struck by critical IT outages, triggering alarming patient delays.
Victoria
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Major hospitals in Melbourne’s east have been struck by a significant system outage, triggering an internal emergency and patient delays.
Eastern Health on Thursday morning confirmed a code yellow had been issued across its health services, including Box Hill, Maroondah and Ferntree Gully hospitals.
IT systems have been hit by a “critical core system outage”, according to an Eastern Health statement, forcing hospitals into “downtime” mode.
It is not yet known whether the shutdown was caused by a cyber attack.
The extent of patient delays was unclear on Thursday morning but some reports indicated “absolute mayhem” with scans, triage lines and emergency buzzers all down.
A code yellow emergency means service delivery has been impacted and can include staff inability to treat patients waiting in emergency.
“Hospital systems have reverted to downtime procedures and business continuity plans have been enacted,” Eastern Health’s statement said.
“We will continue to keep our staff, patients and healthcare partners informed as the situation unfolds.”
It’s understood hospital systems have been down since Wednesday night, with ambulances turned away amid the IT crisis.
Eastern Health, however, said its hospitals were still taking in critical passengers and that elective surgeries were largely expected to proceed on Thursday.
Premier Daniel Andrews downplayed the shutdown, saying he was confident it would soon be rectified.
“Back-up or contingency planning goes into place where they go back to paper if they have to,” he said.
“I’m very confident that they’ll get back up and running.
“I understand that it’s the inability of one server to talk to another.
“It’s not anything beyond that … they’ll get back online as soon as they can.”
more to come...
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