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The position of Scottish Government and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde remains unchanged. The eHealth Strategy makes clear the commitment for all health boards to become ‘paper-light’ in a controlled and incremental fashion because of the considerable benefits that this brings (including better service continuity and information availability compared to paper). Paper workarounds do have their place in certain circumstances, but increasingly health boards are deploying more resilient ICT which means that information can still be available from alternative digital sources. Each board has business continuity plans, and associated guidance in this area.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde runs dual active data centres, separated by 14 km and the River Clyde. These are linked by multiple super-high speed data connections, making the concept of a passive disaster recovery site redundant. This design is accepted best practice for modern data centres.

A full Active Directory recovery was not performed due to not having an environment where this could be done safely. This is now being re-assessed. However, the backups have been used previously to perform granular recovery of Active Directory objects in the live active directory.

Maternity and emergency services were maintained throughout the period disrupted by the IT incident.

Reduced auditing was in place due to the impact that such services have on systems performance. We are however reviewing this in light of the recent incident and will introduce appropriate and proportionate auditing in due course.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s statistics for “Outage” include incidents where systems remain fully available to users, but elements are undergoing maintenance or remedial activities. In the period 2 October to 3 December there have been 10 planned outages (all restricted to either individual applications or sites. All occurred either out of hours when no users dependent on the services, or by pre-arrangement such that no risk to services occurred). There have been four periods of unplanned partial/total individual server outages during the period under review. These ranged between five and 60 minutes and on none of these occasions were patient services disrupted. This must be placed within the context of an IT estate with over 400 applications, supporting 11 major hospitals, over 250 GP and Health Centres and 40,000 staff.

Native Windows Server Backup was not being used prior to the incident. Symantec Backup Exec was used to backup the domain controllers. It was Symantec Backup Exec which was used to recover Active Directory.

More than 10,000 patients were attended by medical staff during the IT failure of 1 October 2013. As there was variable access to both electronic and paper clinical notes throughout the incident it is not possible to quantify for how many patients clinical notes were not available in each case.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde regards its IT Information Systems as critical health infrastructure. Accordingly it would not be appropriate to put detailed systems documentation (especially Information Security) into the public domain.

Information processing has been completed. All national returns have been provided and all patient transactions processed. No business or patient data was lost.