Code grey hits Ottawa-area hospitals

OTTAWA – Computer issues affected two Ottawa-area hospitals last weekend, one week after a “critical” network outage at all three campuses of The Ottawa Hospital. A code grey is called when a hospital experiences a loss of a utility, like power or telecommunications, that impacts operations.

The Queensway Carleton Hospital’s internet connection and external telephone lines went down Friday around 2 p.m. Its “code grey” was declared over at 9:38 a.m. on Saturday, with hospital staff citing a network hardware failure and a delay in the redundancy system as the root cause of the outage.

“Our secondary network core is up and running, and the system, application and phone issues have been resolved,” a hospital spokesperson told CBC News by email on Saturday.

While staff were using paper records and other procedures used during outages, clinical teams are now able to chart using their normal software.

“Those surgical pre-op calls that were not completed on Friday afternoon will be prioritized for Monday,” the spokesperson said. “Appointments for next week will proceed as scheduled.”

Just before 5 p.m. on Friday, Montfort Hospital tweeted that it was also dealing with computer issues. Just before noon on Saturday, the hospital tweeted that its IT issues had been resolved. As of 11 a.m. on Saturday, the hospital’s estimated emergency wait time was 17 hours.