Fiona Stanley Hospital systems crash
Doctors, nurses and administrators at Australia's most technologically advanced hospital were reduced to scribbling on paper when WA Health's computer systems crashed for more than 14 hours.
Fiona Stanley Hospital reverted to "downtime procedures" during a Statewide outage after the department's main data centre in Malaga, run by Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, failed early this month.
It is understood lightning storms caused the problems on February 1.
A Health Department spokesman said the crash resulted in the loss of clinical and non-clinical computer applications and the IT network, including email, from 2.55pm until 5am the next day.
Staff had to use pens and paper and then enter patient data once the system came back online.
"The health information network staff, together with the vendor (Fujitsu), responded immediately to convene management, resolution and a review of the impact to health care services," the spokesman said.
"Hospitals also enacted their downtime procedures and hospital business continuity plans to ensure patient safety was never compromised."
Bankwest, which also uses the data centre, had crashes to its phone and online banking, ATM and EFTPOS services.
