Approximately 1,600 appointments were postponed on Wednesday and Thursday due to an IT outage in the Southern Trust.

A major incident was declared on Wednesday at sites across the trust including Craigavon and Daisy Hill hospitals with patients warned to not attend appointments at any hospital or community service in the area.

In an update for assembly members on Friday, Nesbitt said that appointments associated with acute, elective, mental health and children's and young people's services were postponed.

"There is no suggestion that this was a cyber-related matter," he added.

Sincere regrets

Mr. Nesbitt continued: "I sincerely regret that it was necessary to postpone planned appointments and to have patients conveyed by ambulance to other HSC facilities as a consequence.

"No appointments have been postponed on Friday, and there were no postponements of any appointments for adult community services during this period."

The health minister said his department is supporting with additional support and resource where it is required.

In his update he added: "I can assure members that the SHSCT is working at pace to rebook all postponed appointments as quickly as possible, in line with clinical priorities.

"I appreciate the understanding and patience shown while this is worked through."

Nesbitt said that in line with statutory/legislative requirements the SHSCT have reported the IT outage to both the Information Commissioner's Office and the Competent Authority (Network Information Systems Regulator) and will comply with any requests.

"This is not due to a loss of data, but required when there is non-availability of data or systems for the period of time," he said.

He continued: "Contrary to some commentary in social media I also wish to provide clarification that this was not related to our new digital systems, but was instead related to the data centres which our systems rely upon."

Review to be carried out

Mr. Nesbitt said a review would be carried out into the outage

He said: "The scope will be to look wider than the root cause of the technical issue and consider the steps taken by the trust in advance of the outage and subsequently.

"This will include the trust's approach to decision making and the effectiveness of business continuity arrangements.

"This group is also tasked with identifying learning from the incident for the trust as well as the rest of the region.

"My department will continue to oversee the recovery and learning processes associated with this major incident and I again reiterate my apologies to all impacted patients, service users and staff." (BBC, but headline rejigged)