OVER 18,000 appointments at Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in a five-week period were either cancelled or re-scheduled due to the introduction of a new electronic patient record system.

Back in late October, the hospital announced that the embedding of the new system called Alex Health would mean the hospital would be operating at a “reduced capacity”.

YH put in a number of Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) in order to find out what that meant in terms of cancelled appointments.

In mid-December we revealed that between October 31st and November 18th, 9,149 appointments were cancelled or rescheduled.

We then put in another FOI covering the period November 19th to December 8th, 2024.

There were 7,934 appointments canceled or rescheduled.

That makes a grand total of 17,083 in a six week period.

At the time PAH were keen to stress that “patients remained able to access urgent and emergency care, maternity care, and critical services for our inpatients as usual”.

It was one of the subjects we discussed in a wide ranging interview with new PAH boss, Thom Lafferty.

Our December article is below.

Dozens of Your Harlow readers have told us that they received phone calls from admin staff, telling them appointments had been cancelled/rescheduled. Staff, we were told, were very apologetic but were very much on “Don’t shoot the messenger” mode.

There have also been concerns expressed to us that the new electronic record system is putting further burdens on doctors and consultants at the hospital.

We have submitted further FOIs to cover the rest of December and early January.

We contacted the Patient Panel Liaison Group (PALS) but they have not replied.