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

NHS England has warned of “delays” as services recover from Friday’s global IT outage.

The health service said patients who have an appointment this week “should continue to come unless told not to”.

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

The doctors’ union said GPs would need “time to catch up on the work they lost over the weekend” and added that NHS England should “make it clear to patients” that this was the case.

The BMA said its GP committee would continue discussions with NHS England and patient record systems provider EMIS to secure a “better system of IT back-up” to ensure the “disaster” would not be repeated.

A flawed update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many services offline around the world on Friday, canceling flights and trains and paralyzing some healthcare systems.

A fix has been implemented for a bug in the update, which affected devices running the Microsoft Windows operating system. According to George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, it would take “some time” for the systems to be fully restored.

GP practices across England reported on Friday that they were unable to make appointments or access patient records because their EMIS systems were down.

An NHS spokesperson said: “The systems are now back online and patients who have an NHS appointment this week should continue to attend as normal unless they are told not to.

“Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff during this incident, we hope to keep further disruption to a minimum. However, there may still be delays as services are restored, particularly as GPs need to reschedule appointments, so please bear with us.”

“It is important that patients attend appointments as usual unless otherwise instructed. 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, vice-chair of GPC England, the representative body for GPs at the BMA, said: “Friday was one of the toughest days in recent memory for GPs across England. Without a clinical IT system in place, many were forced to revert to pen and paper to help their patients.

“While GPs and their teams worked hard to treat as many patients as possible, much of the work had to be postponed to the following week because they did not have the necessary information.

“GPs have been working hard this weekend to deal with the impact of the catastrophic loss of service on Friday. Now that their IT systems are back online, we thank them and their staff for their hard work in extremely difficult circumstances.

“We also thank the patients for their patience with the GP practice in this unprecedented situation.”

Dr Wrigley added: “The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has resulted in a significant backlog.

“Even if we could guarantee that it would be fully resolved by Monday, GPs would still need time to make up for the hours lost over the weekend, and NHSE (National Health Service England) would need to make it clear to patients that normal services cannot be resumed immediately.

“The BMA GP Committee will continue our dialogue with both EMIS and NHSE to ensure that the coming week can be recovered as quickly as possible and to work urgently to secure a better IT backup system to ensure this disaster does not happen again in the future.”