HOSPITAL operations and consultations are being delayed across England because the new NHS computer system suffers almost one “major incident” failure every day.

Patients have been left waiting on operating tables and others have had appointments cancelled because of problems with the £12.4 billion system.

The scale of the failures has prompted calls for the Government to rethink the future of the world’s largest non-military computer system amid fears about the impact on patient safety.

More than 110 major incidents have been reported by hospitals and GPs over the past four months, Computer Weekly magazine reports today.

The scale of the problems at such an early stage will come as a blow to the National Programme for IT, which is at the heart of Tony Blair’s efforts to modernise the NHS. Over the next ten years the system is due to link more than 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals. Connecting for Health, the body that oversees the programme, said, however, that the new computer system was much more reliable than those that it is replacing.

Reported problems include failures of the system used by surgeons to see X-ray pictures on a computer screen in wards and operating theatres. On some occasions the system has crashed during an operation, forcing the surgeon to suspend the procedure while a hard copy of the X-ray is found.

Hospitals have also lost access to their patient administration systems, which hold records on appointments and planned treatments, so that they do not know who is due to have consultations or treatments.

Experts are concerned at the level of failures so early in the use of the system. Patients will be at even greater risk if the failures continue when the system is expanded across the country to prescribe drugs, order test results and store 50 million medical records.

More than 20 of the major incidents reported over the past four months have affected multiple NHS sites. In July a data centre in Maidstone, Kent, crashed, causing the loss of central services and systems to 80 NHS trusts.

The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust in Oxford said this year that it had identified “major issues of patient safety” when patients were lost in the system after being dropped from waiting lists or were not being called for important treatment.

Richard Bacon, a Tory member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said that the Government needed to reconsider the scheme. “This is the latest evidence that there are serious and growing problems with the whole National Programme for IT in the health service,” he said. “In many respects the NHS IT programme is making things worse, not better, while sowing distrust and disillusionment across the health service.”

Richard Vautrey, a member of the GPs’ joint IT committee of the British Medial Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: “Any system in healthcare has to be available to clinicians and any downtime, however short, can have significant implications. If it is not possible to access the information during the consultation that can make the consultation particularly difficult.”

A Connecting for Health spokesman said that what constituted a major incident was open to interpretation and often problems were reported when systems were simply running slowly. “Connecting for Health is operating systems 24 hours a day, seven days a week in hundreds of locations across England,” he said.

“In that context, what is being quoted represents a very small service interruption and we expect performance to compare favourably with any large-scale organisation that uses IT, especially in the first year of operations.”

dbrown@thetimes.co.uk

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