GWENT’S NHS was struck by computer outages on five occasions during the past few weeks, its chief executive has said.

Nicola Prygodzicz reported the incidents and the failure of CT scanners at the Grange University Hospital, in Cwmbran, to the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board’s November 26 meeting.

She said: “The last few weeks we’ve had some significant challenges. In a couple of weeks we had five IT outages as a result of some BT national work impacting locally.”

She said the board has been in discussion with the Welsh Government and the telecoms firm.

The board announced last week that both its CT scanners at the Grange had stopped working.

Ms Prygodzicz: “Both CT scanners at the Grange wend down last week and that put us in a critical incident and impacted for two days. Teams worked really hard to manage that and we had support from both Cwm Taff and Cardiff (health boards) but was mostly managed internally and was back up and running in 36 hours.”