Year 2000 failure disables hospital
Ag@whd
hospital [ I know the hospital well ] knocked out the telecoms
system and left the hospital unable to handle a major emergency for
24 hours.
The incident, described by the hospital as 'critical', happened in
the early hours of Sunday after a failed installation of new
software and hardware to make the switch board - a Siemens ISDXL
year 2000 compliant.
Robin Guenier, executive director of Taskforce 2000, said: 'This is
the only critical situation arising from year 2000 that I've heard
of. If you're upgrading a telecoms network, you should do it offline
if at all possible'
The replacement had a faulty Siemens backplane the switch equivalent
of a motherboard - from Kingston Communications, which rendered it
inoperable.
Alvin Morgan, telecoms data consultant with the Oxford Radcliffe
Hospitals Trust, said: 'Normally, we test the system before
installing it, but this time a backplane had been supplied which was
faulty. We got a new one, but didn't have time to test it before the
installation. It turned out to be faulty too.'
It then proved impossible to revert successfully to the older
system.
Until 3am on Monday, the hospital had only 65 working phone lines,
compared with its usual 2,300.
A Reading hospital was put on alert during the incident after fears
that the John Radcliffe was not adequately prepared for a major
emergency.
Adrian
WWW WWW Adrian Gothard
WWW ww WWW White Horse Design
WWWWWWWWWW
WWWW WWWW w...@zetnet.co.uk, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/whd
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Designers of video capture/filter/processing systems for aircraft