Debate contribution: Southern Trust: IT Outage

Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on 22 September 2025.

MLA

Mr Mike Nesbitt

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

22 September 2025

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Questions for Urgent Oral Answer

Heading

Southern Trust: IT Outage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5123922

Read the official Assembly record

Text

The incident lasted over two days because there had to be a great level of concern that rebooting the system, if I may use that phrase, too quickly could have led to a further collapse in the system. That is why it was brought on gradually with those priority areas, which, as I said, were the labs, emergency departments, ICUs and night-time medicines. There had to be caution about coming back on. As we stand, a few days on, we know what happened. A planned upgrade of software went wrong, but we do not know why it went wrong, so we need to know why. I am particularly interested to know why the two data centres malfunctioned. I am looking at it from the point of view of there being a primary system and a backup system. Clearly, if there is a backup system, that should not fall along with the primary one. Its exact existence is to be a backup when things start to go wrong. As to the 1,600 people, what the trust will have to do now is look at the clinical priorities when rescheduling. It is inevitable and logical to assume that some people who have a date for a procedure will be asked to endure a postponement, because their condition is not as urgent as, perhaps, some of the 1,600 people whose appointments were postponed last week on 17 and 18 September. That bit of work will be ongoing over a number of days, if not a short number of weeks, because it is complex.

I should take the opportunity to say that it was stressful not just for patients and, to some extent, service users but for the staff who found that they could not perform as they had intended to. Some of those staff have built up personal and professional relationships with patients over a period. The fact that our waiting lists are far too long has probably compounded that, with professionals becoming much more accustomed to meeting and greeting and building those relationships with people. I should also say that mutual aid was first-class in the early assessment. We are talking about, for example, emergency departments in other trusts receiving ambulances that otherwise would have gone to Daisy Hill or Craigavon Area Hospital. I was pleased with that. I thank all the staff involved and recognise the moral distress that that put them under. As to whether that mutual aid will continue, with other trusts accepting some of the 1,600 patients for procedures, that is a clinical matter to be decided by the Southern Trust in liaison with the other four trusts. I am not aware of where that conversation has got to. I have spoken to my chief digital officer twice today about the time frame for figuring out why what went wrong went wrong. There will be other meetings today about how we prioritise those 1,600 people on the elective lists.

I will not endorse the Member's description that it was a "catastrophic event". It was certainly a very serious event, particularly for the 1,600 people whose elective procedures were cancelled. However, the hospital continued to function to some degree and emergencies were dealt with, so I will stick with a "very serious event" rather than a "catastrophic event". As to the allegations that there was some sort of glitch on the evening of Monday 8 September, that is news to me. Believe me: there will be officials in the Department who are listening to and watching this, and they will be on the case, trying to verify or otherwise what happened.

Yes, I agree with the Member. As I indicated, clinical decisions will be made about the 1,600 who had their elective procedures postponed. That will have a knock-on effect for others who are on the list, waiting for procedures, because it will be done according to clinical priority. I also commend the trust for the speed and effectiveness with which it instigated its business-continuity arrangements; in other words, how it dealt with that very serious incident. All staff are to be commended on their efforts during the incident and for restoring access within 24 hours of the outage. That was a lot quicker than any early estimate, so, once again, I commend the staff for that.

I concur with the Member: you can invest and invest in all sorts of areas of health and social care. I make the point again that there is a gap of many hundreds of millions of pounds in the current budget for health and social care. However, on IT, particularly encompass, I emphasise yet again that what happened was not a cyberattack, nor was it some sort of systemic failure in Epic, which is the engine that drives encompass. We still do not know why it went wrong. However, encompass is a world leader. The Member will be aware that, when Labour came to power, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in London, Wes Streeting, said that he wanted to achieve three shifts, one of which was moving from an analogue to a digital healthcare system. We are ahead of the game. All of our health and social care trusts are on encompass, but it is like that old saying: when it works, it's great; when it doesn't work, you have a major problem — and I very much regret that.

The trust did the best that it could in communicating in live time with patients, service users and the population more generally. Of course, that was compounded by the fact that the IT systems were down, because the IT systems are the primary means of communication. That will, of course, be part of the review. Two processes in the review will follow what happened on 17 and 18 September. In the first instance, it will be a core review of why it went wrong. That review will be shared across the trusts in case there are learnings for the other trusts. The other review will be of how well the trust was able to employ its business-continuity arrangements — in other words, to continue to try to serve patients and service users. Once again, there may be learnings for all the trusts, because, as I said, a form of mutual aid was employed, not least with ambulances going to emergency departments in hospitals in other trusts.

The Member said that this was "catastrophic". I wonder what descriptor she would have used if somebody had actually died in an incident like this. There is not a lot left in the thesaurus above and beyond "catastrophic".

From a personal point of view, yes, there is concern. That concern will remain until I am satisfied that we know not just what happened but why. As the Member suggested, I imagine that updates to IT systems happen all the time. On my smartphone, apps seem to be updated hourly, or perhaps even more frequently. That is one of the issues on which my chief digital officer will report back to me. The core point is that, until we know why it happened, I will remain concerned, and I may be concerned once I know the reason.

I believe that I am in that position. I certainly have not been made aware that there was any leakage of personal data or, indeed, any other data. As I understand it, the system simply stopped working, which means that it was not transmitting any information. If that is the case, that is the assurance for the Member.

1,262 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:13 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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