Singapore healthcare system outage: Services fully restored, investigations ongoing

[SINGAPORE] A service disruption that hit Singapore’s public healthcare sector for about 9½ hours on Oct 13 has been resolved.

Affected systems used by patients were progressively restored from around 3pm, with services fully restored by 4.37 pm, said national healthtech agency Synapxe in a Facebook post at around 5.40 pm.

The disruption affected the public healthcare clusters – NHG Health, National University Health System (NUHS) and SingHealth.

There is no indication that the service disruption was a cyber incident, and investigations are ongoing, said Synapxe.

At around 7.10 am, a technical issue affecting network connectivity resulted in disruptions to some services across the public healthcare clusters, Synapxe said.

These included patient services such as appointment booking through call centres, visitor registration and billing inquiries.

During the disruption, patients and visitors at some public healthcare institutions experienced longer waiting times for certain services, it added.

Synapxe said its teams worked closely with the public healthcare clusters to restore services as quickly as possible.

“We apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank patients, visitors and healthcare staff for their patience and understanding,” it said.

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In a media reply after services were restored, NHG Health said that while patient services across its institutions – such as its call centre lines and appointment booking – were affected, patient care was not compromised.

It said its institutions immediately activated established downtime procedures, which allowed clinical services – including emergency care, inpatient care, surgery, medical tests and scans – to continue with minimal disruption.

Medication delivery service also remained available through its pharmacies.

“Additional staff and volunteers stepped forward to support ground operations, assisting patients with registration, and payment on site and easing the impact of the disruption,” it added.

NHG Health was among the first to announce the disruptions on social media.

It said in a Facebook post at about 9 am that call services across its cluster were “temporarily unavailable”.

Three of its institutions – Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Yishun Community Hospital and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital – said in separate Facebook posts that there may be longer waiting times.

During the disruption, NHG Health had advised patients and members of the public to use its websites, HealthHub or the NHG Health App for assistance.

Woodlands Hospital, which is under NHG Health, said at 1.30 pm that its call centre lines had been restored.

Another cluster, NUHS, said in a Facebook post at about 11.30 am that its institutions were experiencing technical disruptions affecting multiple systems.

The National University Hospital (NUH) had said in an Instagram post at about 10.30 am that it was experiencing a “system downtime”.

Apart from NUH, the NUHS cluster also includes Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, Alexandra Hospital and eight polyclinics.

In its post, NUHS sought the public’s understanding for possible longer waiting times and advised patients and the public to check its social media platforms for updates.

“Patient care continues to be our priority,” NUHS said.

SingHealth’s Singapore General Hospital said in a Facebook post at about 11.30 am that it was “experiencing a temporary system disruption affecting some of our services”.

These included outpatient appointment bookings and changes, visitor registration and billing inquiries, it added.

Singapore’s 24-hour mental health helpline and textline, mindline.sg, also reported issues with its hotline and WhatsApp service at 8 am. In an update at noon, it said services were fully operational. THE STRAITS TIMES

• Additional reporting by Judith Tan