The Madrid public health system has been compromised by a computer failure. As confirmed by sources from the Ministry of Health, the problems have occurred intermittently since the weekend. Apparently, it was not possible to access records or the results of medical tests in Madrid's public health centers.

As ABC learned, the computer system has been blocked by a bug, which made it difficult to access the medical records of the patients or the results of the diagnostic tests that had been carried out. This was pointed out to this newspaper by some affected patients in different public hospitals in the region.

Others had seen the pace of their appointments affected: some had been in hospitals since early in the morning waiting to go into consultation, because the schedules were not being met due to complications generated by the computer failure.

In fact, the different departments of the hospitals were organizing themselves with alternative methods -such as manual records- in order to continue caring for patients. This occurred in hospital pharmacies, for example, where this formula was used to dispense medication to chronic patients.

The Ministry of Health assured that they had detected this type of incident, which they described as "intermittent problems", since the weekend. At present, they assured, the technical services of the Ministry were working on the problem, and "it is already recovering".

Days ago there were also computer problems in some Madrid pharmacies, related to electronic prescriptions.