Microsoft outage stopped Cambridgeshire NHS Trust calls

There was a global outage affecting some Microsoft products on July 30.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust confirmed around 20 of its services were impacted by the problem.

At a meeting of the Trust’s board of directors, Holly Sutherland, chief operating officer, said some of their teams were not able to receive calls.

She said: “That was escalated very quickly and we held an operational meeting to understand what was affected.

“Roughly 20 services were affected and were not able to receive calls through their calling routes.

“The one we were most concerned about was the first response service for mental illness, 111 option two.

“However, the team moved on to another platform, we probably had about 40 minutes where we were not able to receive calls before we put another solution in place and calls were able to be received.”

Ms Sutherland said a further meeting was held as the alternative service did not allow them to record calls or to monitor the number of people waiting, which she said they normally would be able to.

She explained that they focused on answering calls to make sure they reached the people in need.

Ms Sutherland added that staff were instructed to take additional notes to make up for the loss of being able to record calls, and said they liaised with the Integrated Care Board to get verbal updates from the 111 service on how many calls were being sent through.

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Scott Haldane, the interim chief executive, said only losing access to call services for a short period of time meant the Trust had not needed to declare a major incident.

However, he said they were looking into playing through what the scenarios could have been if they had needed to do so.

Eileen Milner, the Trust chair, said she believed staff had “worked to do their very best in challenging circumstances”.