The President of the Timmins and District Hospital, BlaisE MacNeil, commented today to Rogers Media on the ongoing technical issues that began at Health Sciences North earlier this week and have impacted 24 hospitals across the region.

MacNeil says the impact the TADH is facing is a result of a virus that affected Health Sciences North on Wednesday morning. Systems that connect all northeastern hospitals have since been isolated so the virus does not spread. It’s this isolation that has impacted TADH and other regional hospitals.

MacNeil says that while all their systems are secure, the hospital cannot benefit from the central network until HSN’s systems are secure. He says whatever HSN does to secure their own system, TADH needs to implement that as well so they won’t be affected by whatever caused the virus.

The Timmins and District Hospital has been experiencing some administration delays because they’ve had to revert to paper processes while their systems are isolated and put on downtime.

“We’ve had to revert to paper processes,” MacNeil says, “and paper processes are much slower than using electronic functionality. And some of our newer staff, this is completely new to them. So things are taking longer.”

MacNeil adds that this has, unfortunately, impacted patients.

“We’ve tried to make the impacts to patients as minimal as possible, but there have been impacts,” he said. “Elective work in DI (diagnostic imaging) has not been performed. And that, in turn, has affected the fracture clinic, which we’d hoped to operate today as usual. But it hasn’t worked well. So we’re cancelling this afternoon and Monday.

“Chemotherapy patients have been affected,” he continued, “because one of the key systems that we rely on is hosted at HSN. And in consultation with the oncologists there, they felt it was better to cancel the chemo treatments today. And we had hoped to restart them tomorrow, but it looks like we won’t be able to restart them tomorrow. We hope to restart them on Monday with some extended hours to try and catch up.”

MacNeil says that HSN has assured them and the public that no patient information has been breached. MacNeil adds that by using paper, they are ensuring that any new information from a patient is being recorded, preserved and re-entered into their Meditech system.

When asked about a possible date or time for a resolution to this problem, MacNeil said it’s hard to tell at this point.

“This is very dynamic,” he said, “and they (HSN) have been working all day and through the night with a security firm to make sure their systems are secured so they can be safely brought back online.”

MacNeil says any information patients might need will be issued on their website and through social media. They will also issue press releases as more information becomes available.

“For the time being, at least,” he said, “we’re asking for the patience of our public so that they understand that, by all means, if there’s a problem, present to the hospital as you normally would. But please bear with us as we work through this process.”

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