NHS England has said that systems are now back online following last week’s global IT outage but has warned that GP services will need longer to recover.
Meanwhile, GP practices, which lost access to EMIS leaving them out of action, should tally up the cost of the disruption and send an invoice to their ICB, chair of the BMA’s GP Committee (GPC) England, Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer has said.
Yesterday, GPC England said that despite practices ‘pulling out the stops at the weekend’ to deal with the fallout of the outage,’ which led to a ‘catastrophic loss of service’ there is still a considerable backlog and GPs will need time this week ‘to catch up from lost work over the weekend.’
GPs posting on X pointed out that to cope with the extra workload, they have had to bear the burden of additional costs, such as booking locums in for today.
This prompted Dr Bramall-Stainer to reply that practices should put in a claim to recover costs. ‘Cost up everything and send [an] invoice to [the] ICB,’ she posted on X.
Last week’s outage, caused by a ‘defect’ at global cyber security firm CrowdStrike, also affected pharmacies attempting to pull up electronic prescriptions, flights, trains and bank services.
Dr Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of GPC England described last Friday, when the outage occurred, as ‘one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England’.
He further explained: ‘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.
‘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,’ he added.
Dr Wrigley said the BMA will ‘continue a dialogue’ this coming week with both EMIS and NHS England to urgently work on securing a better system of IT backup, ‘so that this disaster is not repeated in future.’
NHS England’s statement issued today 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.’
Dr Frances O’Hagan, chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland GP committee, has also warned ‘there will be considerable strain on general practice’ this week as there is a backlog of work.
She added: ‘To ensure such an outage does not have a similar impact in the future… we would call for more investment from the Department of Health in contingency planning and recovery plans.’
Digital Health and Care Wales said that there may be ‘residual impact from the initial outage’ but that in the main IT issues affecting GP services were resolved last Friday.
TPP’s SystmOne GP IT system was unaffected by the outage.
