Ottawa

Computer issues plagued 2 Ottawa-area hospitals over weekend

Computer issues affected two Ottawa-area hospitals this weekend, coming a week after a "critical" network outage at all three campuses of The Ottawa Hospital.

Queensway Carleton Hospital’s ‘code grey’ now resolved

hospital entrance
Patients coming to the Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH) during a "planned downtime" on Sept. 28 faced potential harm, according to doctors who urged QCH leadership to close the ER for that duration. (Jean Delisle/CBC)

Computer issues affected two Ottawa-area hospitals this weekend, one week after a "critical" network outage at all three campuses of The Ottawa Hospital. 

The Queensway Carleton Hospital's internet connection and external telephone lines went down Friday around 2 p.m. 

Its "code grey" was declared over at 9:38 a.m. on Saturday, with hospital staff citing a network hardware failure and a delay in the redundancy system as the root cause of the outage.

A code grey is called when a hospital experiences a loss of a utility, like power or telecommunications, that impacts operations.

"Our secondary network core is up and running, and the system, application and phone issues have been resolved," a hospital spokesperson said by email on Saturday. 

While staff were using paper records and other procedures used during outages, clinical teams are now able to chart using their normal software. 

"Those surgical pre-op calls that were not completed on Friday afternoon will be prioritized for Monday," the spokesperson said. "Appointments for next week will proceed as scheduled."

Just before 5 p.m. on Friday, Montfort Hospital tweeted that it was also dealing with computer issues. Just before noon on Saturday, the hospital tweeted that its IT issues had been resolved. 

As of 11 a.m. on Saturday, the hospital's estimated emergency wait time was 17 hours. 

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