Computer Malfunction Takes Hospital Records Offline

A malfunction left public hospital doctors unable to dispense medication or check patient records through their computer system for more than an hour on Friday evening.

RTHK has learnt that several major hospitals, including Prince of Wales, Queen Mary and Tuen Mun, were affected by the outage in the clinical management system.

Doctors couldn't log into the system from about 7pm until emergency repairs were completed at 8.20pm.

The authority cited a "network problem, affecting the access of healthcare staff to save or retrieve patients' medical records".

It added: "During this period, clinical departments switched its operation to contingency mode, including manual input of medical records and taking patients' medical history verbally."

The authority said it would "conduct an in-depth investigation into the incident" and "expressed apology to the public for the inconvenience caused during the system disruption".