Restoration of patient records system and your data

Our patient record system Carenotes experienced a national outage in August affecting a number of NHS Trusts. It was confirmed by our suppliers shortly after the outage, and again in November by third-party auditors, that there was no compromise or loss of patient data from the system.

Since the summer, we have been working with our supplier and other Trusts to restore the system as quickly and safely as possible, and our robust business continuity processes ensured that we were able to continue to provide our services where it was safe to do so.

In late November, our IT team were provided with access to the system again and since then they have been working to ensure the system is secure and fit for purpose. Following satisfactory testing last week, our IT team has successfully restored the system, along with a large number of records from the outage period, and our staff and clinicians are now able to use the system again.

There are, however, a large number of outstanding records that need to be manually inputted back onto the system and validated by clinicians, which may take some time. Until this work is complete, not all data will be accessible within the system, and so our ability to provide complete data sets and respond to freedom of information (FOI) requests will still be limited. We will update you as soon as this work is complete.

Maintaining the security and accuracy of patient data has been our top priority during this process. We appreciate the patience that patients and staff have shown during the time it has taken to ensure the system is fully fit and ready to use. We are particularly grateful to staff for the additional work they have, and are, putting in to ensure all our patient records are fully up to date.