NHS e-Referral System Down For Three Days

The newly launched NHS e-Referrals system, a system which allows patients to book hospital appointments online, has been experiencing further “technical difficulties.”

Earlier this week, 24N reported that on the first day alone, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) had logged over 30 known issues for e-Referrals.  

Since then, it seems the website actually broke, causing frustration and concern amongst potential users – many took to Twitter to voice their concerns, as demonstrated in the image below.

Although the website is now live again, a message at the time reassured patients that issues were being resolved as quickly as possible and disruption was being kept to a minimum.

The Summary of Known Issues log however, has not been updated since Monday when the new service first went live.

“The NHS England e-Referral system is already suffering from ‘technical problems’ just two days after being launched – even the service status page isn’t working,” claimed Michael Allen, solutions VP for digital business performance specialist Dynatrace.

“The HSCIC, which runs the system, had already flagged that there were over 30 existing problems with the service – this begs the question, why did the launch go ahead?

“It is much more expensive to fix application problems in the field, rather than in the testing environment – not to mention creating more frustration for customers and embarrassment for the organisations responsible.

“I’m not sure why the public has been used as guinea pigs in this instance, but ensuring that applications – particularly those that will be used by the public – are thoroughly tested and debugged, with any issues ironed out before launch, is just common sense.

“Shame it wasn’t followed in this instance,” he added.

© 24N.biz