Lakes DHB 'doing okay' without computer system

Lakes District Health Board is no closer to determining when its computer system will be back online, but is hopeful it will be in the "next couple of days".

The system shut down when a fire started in Rotorua Hospital's Uniterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) system early Monday morning.

Services in the Lakes area, including Rotorua and Taupo hospitals, will be entering their third day tomorrow without full access to electronically stored files - including some patient information.

Rotorua Fire Brigade senior station officer Tony Kelly determined the cause of the fire was electrical.

"One of the electrical systems caught fire and the carbon dioxide drenching system was able to knock the fire down before we arrived, limiting the amount of damage it caused."

He did not know how the electrical system caught fire.

Lakes District Health Board communications officer Sue Wilkie said it was a day by day process but scheduled elective surgeries would proceed as normal tomorrow. "We still have no clear way forward in terms of a timeline as we are still in the assessment phase.

"We are hopeful we will have something up and running in the next couple of days."

Ms Wilkie said clinical services were working well with paper systems in place.

"People should expect delays - things are slower when it's paper-based but I think we're doing okay, there's a lot going on in the background.

"People have been pretty understanding. It was unexpected but we've had to make the best of it.

"We've received a fantastic amount of support and offers of help from neighbouring DHBs with staff, computer hardware and accessing files."

She said while the back up server was in the same room as the main server, there was another in a data centre off site.

Back up tapes are also run daily, weekly and monthly which are also kept off site.

"We have covered the bases in a number of ways so while there was a back up system in there, it was not our only one."