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back to article NHS systems fell offline for 1,300+ hours over 36 months, cyber-nasties fingered – FoI study

NHS trusts across England experienced more than 1,300 hours of downtime in the last three years, according to results from Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. Nearly a third of the trusts (25 out of 80) that responded to an FoI request from Intercity Technology admitted they had experienced outages across their IT systems …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    85% uptime?!

    1300 hours of downtime out of 36 months, assuming 24/7 operation, is 15% downtime. That's not even one 9 of uptime. WTF?

    0 2 Reply
    1. Packet
      Reply Icon

      Re: 85% uptime?!

      Wow i'm glad you already calculated the uptime (saved me the trouble of doing it myself)

      That's rather appalling availability - no matter how you slice it.

      0 1 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 85% uptime?!

        Oh, for god's sake - that's the downtime of any part of the NHS over that time period, not the whole lot grinding to a halt. At least think for a short period before posting, or maybe see your GP if you can't see what your cognitive problem is.

        11 1 Reply
      2. Cav Bronze badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: 85% uptime?!

        At the extreme that could be 1 PC down for 54 days, in three years, which would be irrelevant across the whole NHS. Without knowing exactly what systems were affected, and to what extent, it's impossible to say how bad the availability was.

        2 3 Reply
  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    It's difficult to make any sense* of these figures unless we know how many PCs were in use in those trusts. Not the number of PC affected although that would also be interesting, but the total number in use.

    * As demonstrated up-thread.

    5 0 Reply
  3. EnviableOne

    they only sent the FoI to 147 trusts and only 80 responded, there are over 200 trusts, and ive you include CCGs which run GP services theres over 400 in england.

    I'd be intrested in their smapling method, and I'd hazzard a guess one of there respondents was North Lincolnshire and Goole.

    Correcting maths above, 1300hours of downtime in 80 trusts over 36 months 95% uptime (or1.5 9s)

    And chances are this is the bad part of the nhs so system wide we are lookin at atleast two if not 3 9s. The problem with availablity in the NHS is resillience is sacrificed to shiny whistles and bells, as its dificult to quantify "If this component fails..."

    0 0 Reply
    1. Halfmad
      Reply Icon

      You do know that every department in the NHS is required to have contingency plans for when systems are down and every trust also has SLAs attached to each of it's systems which includes a degree of "acceptable" downtime e.g. 4/8 hours.

      Systems going down isn't unusual, it's actually becoming less of a problem as sysadmins are able to point to Wannacry and say "we've got to do maintenance" now where as before this was damn near impossible.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intercity Technology sent 143 NHS Trusts in England FoI requests in February 2017. Eighty responded

    Wonder if we should FOI them to find how much money is spent answering FOIs for a few column inches? What benefit has this given us? We know they went down at Wannacry - because they told us, when they go down local press know about it and it's normally on their social media pages as annoyed patients turn to twitter.

    0 1 Reply
  5. Sheepykins

    Shocker

    No? Really? An underfunded and understaffed service was found to be vulnerable to outages and attacks?

    /gasp

    1 0 Reply

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