A RAFT of recommendations have been made after 76 GP practices in the Bradford district were hit by major IT issues.

The Telegraph & Argus reported on the issue when it first came to light in October last year, but more details have come to light following an independent review.

Health bosses met yesterday at the Carlisle Business Centre in Manningham to discuss the report, where they supported the implementation of the recommendations.

The review revealed the issues began on October 10 last year when there was a forced power down at the Clinical Commissioning Groups' former base at Douglas Mill on Bowling Old Lane.

This was caused by a serious air conditioning equipment failure. The shutdown happened as data was being moved to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.

The report said the lack of resilience was a "known risk", which had been highlighted both in 2013 and 2016.

"There have been a number of previous outages and the IT infrastructure was accepted as being not fit for purpose. There were historical delays in addressing this infrastructure risk," said the report.

It said while the system was not ready for the incident it "responded well to the crisis", but could have been better prepared.

GP practices faced more than three weeks of problems, which included delays in routine referral and no electronic prescribing.

The report said there had been a "considerable backlog" of work and surgeries had to turn to fax machines to send urgent referrals to hospitals. In some cases, members of staff had to deliver paper referrals by hand.

The report said GP practices felt "unprepared" and "there was considerable frustration and uncertainty and a sense of the need to learn from this experience and ensure that it does not happen again".

A spokesperson for NHS Airedale, Wharfedale and Craven, Bradford City and Bradford District clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) said: “Our main focus was to ensure that people in the area continued to receive a high quality, safe service when they visited GP practices.

"We worked closely with clinicians to put in place systems and processes to manage and mitigate risks in clinical quality and care. GPs were able to see and update patient records and had systems in place to manage urgent and fast-track referrals. Patients continued to be seen.

"Following the incident, a clinical quality review concluded that there had been no identification of patient harm and no associated breaches of information governance as a consequence of the outage.”

“An independent IT review concluded that our local system responded well to the incident and that the CCGs fulfilled our broad responsibilities.

"We have also completed an action plan that includes a number of recommendations arising from the independent IT review and clinical review that we continue to work with our GP practices and our IT supplier (eMBED Health Consortium) to implement. A goodwill payment of £1,000 was provided to each GP practice affected.

"There were no additional financial costs to our CCGs.”