HEALTH staff in Bolton have been wrestling with a widespread computer system failure.

It has affected the Royal Bolton Hospital and staff at Bolton Primary Care Trust (PCT) as well as up to 80 other NHS trusts across the country.

The hospital's Operating Room Management Information System (ORMIS) was down on Sunday, Monday and part of Tuesday, leaving theatre staff relying on paper files for information.

Management said patient care had not been affected. Bolton PCT experienced widespread system failure across its community health care centres until yesterday morning.

NHS Connecting for Health, responsible for health service computer systems, said equipment failure had led to the collapse of the system on Sunday, which has left Trusts in the North West and West Midlands struggling to access data.

The system failure was caused by a problem at computer firm CSC's Maidstone Data Centre.

A spokesman for the Royal Bolton Hospital said: "The Royal Bolton Hospital has experienced limited system failure as a result of the problems at the CSC centre in Maidstone.

"RBH's theatre IT system, ORMIS, was affected and the staff in theatres reverted back to manual procedures and paper-based systems and patient care has not been affected.

"There is no patient medical data stored electronically at the Trust as all records are still stored in paper form so no general disruption to patient care across the Trust has occurred."

But the spokesman added that Bolton PCT had experienced widespread system failure across its community health care centres and staff there had had to revert to manual processes to ensure service and patient safety were maintained.

The hospital's Ormis system was introduced in March this year as part of a national IT programme deliverd by NHS Connecting for Health, to enable the hospital to make the most of its 18 theatres.

Adrian McDermott, deputy chief information officer for NHS North West, said the computer problem meant medical staff in the region had not been able to check hospital appointments on screen, but were having to do the work manually, through lists on paper.

About 2,000 patients in Greater Manchester had been affected, but hospitals and clinics had contingency plans in place to deal with the problem.

Mr McDermott said the system crash had not resulted in any medical emergencies and it had not affected the computer system that allows doctors to look up the medical records of patients.

He added: "We have managed the impact as best we can."