Barts Health NHS Trust has cancelled 136 operations and hundreds of chemotherapy appointments due to IT failure

Pathology and image viewing applications have finally been restored across the Trust after two-week outage

Barts Health NHS Trust has had to cancel 136 operations and hundreds of chemotherapy appointments after an IT failure left a number of its critical applications unavailable to staff.

The issue, which began on Thursday April 20, and has still not entirely been fixed - but the organisation has said in a statement that its pathology and image viewing applications have been restored across the Trust. It said there were other areas where it would "take time" before it's on track again but did not specify which areas these were or what needed to be done.

In a statement sent to Computing, the Trust said:

"Unfortunately, it has been necessary to cancel 136 operations, representing about 2.5 per cent of our usual weekly in-patient activity. Several hundred chemotherapy appointments have been cancelled, however we have now recovered the chemotherapy prescribing database."

It added: "Clinical teams have completed a patient-by-patient review to ensure that the appropriate course of action is taken for each of them, endeavouring to keep the disruption to an absolute minimum. We apologise to those affected and will reschedule their appointment for as soon as we are able."

The latest statement is in contrast to the initial statement the Trust sent to Computing last week. Nearly eight days after the IT failure, the organisation said that it had been necessary to "cancel a very small number of elective operations that were reliant on images" - and that "some patients attending outpatients are experiencing delays".

But this has now spiralled into "several hundreds" of chemotherapy appointments and 136 operations having to be cancelled.

The Trust did not reveal exactly how the IT failure occurred but said that it would "work urgently to maintain the operational resilience of its services, using tried and tested contingency plans to keep our patients safe".