Health sector warns of ‘delays’ as services recover from global IT outage

NHS England and pharmacies have warned of “delays” and services being “slower than usual” as the health sector continues to recover from Friday’s global IT outage.

The health service said patients with appointments this week “should continue to attend unless told not to”, while the chairman of the National Pharmacy Association has asked people to “be patient” as pharmacists work to “catch up on the backlog of prescriptions”.

Nick Kaye, chairman of the association which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, said: “As pharmacists recover from last week’s IT outage and catch up on the backlog of prescriptions, we expect service in some community pharmacies to be slower than usual today.

“Please be patient with your local pharmacy team if you are visiting them, as they may still be prioritising emergency prescriptions from their local GP surgeries as well as experiencing increased demand as services return to normal.

“As ever, community pharmacies have worked hard to provide support for those who need them during this period.”

It comes after the British Medical Association (BMA) warned on Sunday that normal GP service “cannot be resumed immediately” after the outage caused a “considerable backlog”.

The trade union for doctors said GPs will “need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend”, adding that NHS England should “make clear to patients” this is the case.

The BMA said its GP committee will continue to talk to NHS England and patient record system supplier EMIS to secure a “better system of IT back-up” to ensure the “disaster” is not repeated.

A flawed update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many services offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling some healthcare systems.

A fix was deployed for a bug in the update, which affected equipment running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said it would take “some time” for systems to be fully restored.

The cybersecurity firm said in a statement on Sunday night that a “significant number” of the around 8.5 million affected Windows devices were now back online and operational.

The company said it was also working on a new “opt-in technique” to speed up the fix process.

Across England, GP surgeries reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records on Friday as their EMIS system went down.

An NHS spokesman said: “Systems are now back online, and patients with an NHS appointment this week should continue to attend unless told not to.

“Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff throughout this incident we are hoping to keep further disruption to a minimum; however, there still may be some delays as services recover, particularly with GPs needing to rebook appointments, so please bear with us.

“It’s important that patients attend appointments as normal unless told otherwise. You can contact your GP in the usual way, or use your local pharmacy, NHS 111 online or call 111 for urgent health advice.”

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chairman of GPC England, the representative body for GPs at the BMA, said: “Friday was one of the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England. Without a clinical IT system many were forced to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients.

“While GPs and their teams worked hard to look after as many as they could, without access to the information they needed much of the work has had to be shifted into the coming week.

​“GPs have been pulling out all the stops this weekend to deal with the effects of Friday’s catastrophic loss of service and, as their IT systems come back online, we thank them and their staff for their hard work under exceptionally trying circumstances.

“We also thank patients for bearing with general practice in this unprecedented situation.”​Dr Wrigley added: “The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has meant a considerable backlog.

“Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday, GPs would still need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend, and NHSE (National Health Service England) should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately.​“The BMA’s GP committee will continue our dialogue with both EMIS and NHSE, both to make sure that the coming week can be used to recover as quickly as possible and to urgently work on securing a better system of IT back-up so that this disaster is not repeated in future.”