Q. The recent talk of power outages got me thinking of how best our practice could prepare for such an event. Any advice?

A. Most general practices would probably function as an 'emergency service only' during a power outage. Our dependence on technology has increased over the past 20 years and we take reliable power for granted. As well as the obvious casualties such as computers, phones, heating and lights, we would expect problems with alarm systems, water systems, fridges and mobile devices. There may be a possibility of one landline functioning on your telephone switchboard, but if the local mobile phone masts are out of power then your smartphone is an expensive brick.

The main concern with power outages of any kind, whether due to industrial disputes, planned maintenance or electrical storms, is to protect the computer hardware and your electronic patient records. Your server hosts the database of your practice software system that contains all your patient records. If power fails and your server crashes there is a risk of damage to the server hard drive and corruption of the data. The best way to protect against this is to have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for your server. This allows you to shut down your server in a controlled manner when the power goes out. A UPS provides clean power and contains a big battery to buy you some time. All of the other computers, printers and routers should have power surge protectors.

If you are in the mood for a bit of disaster planning, then look at your data backup system. Is it working? How do you know? Are you taking a copy off site? Have you done a test restore? Have you both local backup and online backup to the cloud? If you do a search on www.gpit.ie/faq for backup you will find lots of advice.