John Ely Deputy Health Editor for Mailonline
13:09 22 July 2024, updated 14:46 22 July 2024
- Have you been affected by an NHS IT outage? Contact john.ely@mailonline.co.uk
Patients may struggle to get appointments, prescriptions and test results this week due to the continued impact of Microsoft’s global outage on Friday.
NHS bosses, health workers and pharmacists said that while the worst of the crisis was behind them, they expected the backlog from the blackout that halted flights, health systems and some businesses last week to affect services for some time.
Some patients, including those with cancer, also had vital operations delayed by up to a week because surgeons were unable to perform operations on Friday.
It comes as patient groups told MailOnline that the whole fiasco showed the fragility of the “digital first” approach to health services and it was “crazy” that no back-up plans were put in place before the outage.
They said patients were likely still struggling to navigate long GP phone queues today to find out what had happened to canceled appointments and test results.
While GP surgeries bore the brunt of last week’s global IT failure, with two thirds believing they had been brought to a standstill, NHS hospitals were not immune to chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Some patients have even told this website that they are unable to obtain supplies of life-saving drugs.
But a spokesman for NHS England said the brunt of the crisis had now been resolved.
“Systems are now back online and patients who have an NHS appointment this week should continue to attend unless told not to,” they said.
However, they added that delays were still expected.
“Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff during this incident, we hope to keep further disruption to a minimum, however there may be some delays as services resume, particularly with GPs needing to rebook appointments, so please bear with us.” he said.
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The medical trade union, the British Medical Association (BMA), also said GP services were likely to be affected for some time due to the backlog of cases.
Dr. David Wrigley, Deputy Chair of the General Practitioners Union Committee, said: “Friday was one of the busiest days in recent memory for GPs across England.
“Without a clinical IT system, many have been forced to revert to pen and paper to serve their patients.
“While GPs and their teams have been working hard to take care of as much as possible, without access to the information they need, much of the work has had to be pushed into the coming week.”
GP services across the country have been hit hard by the Microsoft outage due to their reliance on the EMIS system.
This system is used by family doctors to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and send referrals.
Around 3,700 GP practices in England are believed to have been affected by the outage, around two-thirds of the nation’s primary care providers.
Dr Wrigley said the fallout from the problems was likely to disrupt GP services for some time.
“The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system caused significant delays,” he said.
“Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday, GPs would still need time to catch up on lost work over the weekend and NHS England should make it clear to patients that a normal service cannot be resumed immediately.”
He added that the BMA is now calling on EMIS, the company that runs the eponymous system, and NHS chiefs to work urgently to “ensure a better IT back-up system is in place to prevent this disaster from happening again in the future”.
Nick Kaye, chairman of the National Pharmacy Association, which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, also said their services were likely to be hit by the shortage.
“As pharmacists recover from last week’s IT outage and catch up on backlogs of prescriptions, we expect services at some community pharmacies to be slower than normal today,” he said.
‘Please be patient with your local pharmacy team if you visit them as they may still be prioritizing emergency prescriptions from their local GP surgeries and may also experience increased demand as services return to normal.’
Dennis Reed of Silver Voices, a patient group aimed at older Britons which has campaigned for better access to GPs, said the ongoing disruption demonstrated the dangers of the NHS relying too much on a “digital first” service.
“It shows the fragmentation and archaic nature of NHS computer systems,” he said.
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“It seems to me like a systematic lack of resilience, if it takes the rest of this week for things to get back to normal, it shows they have no contingency plans for things like this.
“Overreliance on digital health has caused these chickens to come home to roost.”
He added that it was “crazy” for the NHS not to have a back-end system in place for such an IT breach.
“There were doctors available, receptionists available, but it was impossible to book appointments because people don’t know how to use manual records anymore, so if the computer isn’t working, they can’t work,” he said.
“It’s a crazy state of affairs when you have an essential service like the NHS.
“This needs to be resolved so it never happens again.
Mr Reed said many patients would still try to contact their GP to find out what had happened to appointments and tests for conditions or symptoms they were concerned about amid the ongoing disruption.
“This will cause tremendous disruption to patients,” he said.
“They’re going to have canceled appointments and are probably still trying to get on the phone to try and figure out what’s going on.
“It shows again that it’s really hard to get a quick and timely service from the NHS these days.”
He reiterated calls for the BMA to rapidly introduce a back-up system for GP services to minimize such disruption in the future, saying it was “a long time before such a safety system was put in place.
NHS England was unable to provide any figures on how many appointments and treatments were affected by Friday’s IT outage, but said some “administrative systems” at hospitals were affected.
One patient whose surgery was canceled was Chantelle Mooney, 41, who was scheduled to undergo extensive surgery to remove a golf ball-sized mass on her brain.
In February 2022, Ms Mooney was diagnosed with terminal stage 4B cervical cancer which had spread to her lungs.
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She was told three weeks ago that a 4cm mass was also found in her brain – after she started experiencing weakness on one side.
Ms Mooney arrived at Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire on Friday morning expecting to go into surgery at 10am.
But she said her surgeon told her the surgery could be delayed because of the Microsoft outage, where doctors rely on its software for scans, emergency drugs, access to medical records and more.
After spending the morning waiting to see if the problem would be resolved, Ms Mooney was told at 1.30pm that the operation would not go ahead and would be pushed back to next Friday.
Mrs Mooney, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I have a secondary brain tumor – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.
“The brain tumor was only found three weeks ago, it is four centimeters in diameter and has to be removed urgently.
“We were watching TV in the waiting room and saw that the issue with Microsoft was going on.
“Ten minutes later, the surgeon came in and said they couldn’t do the operation without Microsoft.
“Many tools and scans are used by Microsoft and they use it for emergency medicine.
“They said they couldn’t do the surgery until the software was updated.
“It’s a long operation, it can take four to seven hours. [after waiting] at 1:30pm they came back and said there was no way they would do it if it went down again it was too risky.
“At that point I was upset because it had already been pushed back a day.
“But I didn’t realize how much it would affect the operation if it went down again, it would put my life at risk.
She added: “They wouldn’t be able to do brain scans, blood transfusions – they wouldn’t even be able to access my medical records.
“They really didn’t want to cancel the surgery because it’s serious, but at the end of the day my safety comes first.
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been approached for comment.
MailOnline is also aware of other cancer patients, some with late-stage cancer who have had to have their chemotherapy appointments rescheduled.
An IT glitch that began late Thursday night caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, causing departure boards at airports to shut down, flights grounded and TV channels and banks taken offline.
Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologizing for the “disruption” to the service at 6am on Friday when the broadcast was due to start.
It read: “We apologize for interrupting this broadcast. We hope to resume broadcasting Sky News soon.”
Ryanair also appeared to be affected by the issue after posting on its website a call for passengers to arrive at the airport three hours early, blaming “a third-party IT issue which is beyond Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating in entire network”.
Flights continued to be affected today and dozens of other journeys were canceled at airports across England
Ten flights were canceled at Heathrow today, as well as 11 at London City, ten at Gatwick and six at Manchester, as airlines battled to get flight schedules back to normal.
A total of 38 flights were canceled at English airports during the day, with British Airways and easyJet making up the majority with 18 and 10 respectively.
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Arrivals from European cities such as Rome, Berlin and Zurich were among those attacked, as were others from Jamaica and US cities including Las Vegas and New York.
American cyber security company CrowdStrike admitted that a bug behind the outage was a faulty update from them.
Microsoft itself said that the CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.
The firm said this equates to less than 1% of all Windows PCs.
“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by businesses that operate many critical services,” the statement said.
“This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem – global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors and customers.
“It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the technology ecosystem to prioritize operations with secure deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that are in place.”
CrowdStrike chief George Kurtz apologized for the problems caused by the update, saying he was “deeply sorry” and made it clear that “this was not a security or cyber incident.”