THE GUARDIAN
The global IT outages are causing serious problems for the NHS, including GP surgeries, with some forced to turn away patients with routine appointments and see only those classed as an emergency.
Family doctor practices are experiencing major disruption because they cannot access patients’ records or refer them on for tests or appointments at their local hospital.
“Our members are telling us that today’s outage is causing considerable disruption to GP practice bookings and IT systems,” said Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of GPs.
“Outages like this affect our access to important clinical information about our patients, as well as our ability to book tests, make referrals and inform the most appropriate treatment plan.”
Surgeries’ inability to provide their usual range of care is likely to create backlogs of patients who either need to be seen by a GP or receive hospital care or both.
It could also lead some people to seek help at already hard-pressed A&E units.
Pharmacies were also affected, with many unable to give patients medicines they need as quickly as usual because of delays in receiving prescriptions from GPs as a result of the outages, which involve the Windows operating system.
Some hospitals have also had to restrict some types of care, including radiotherapy. The Royal Surrey NHS trust declared a “critical incident” earlier on Friday, because the outages had hit an IT system it uses, and cancelled appointments for radiotherapy it was due to deliver to cancer patients.
In a statement, it said: “Royal Surrey has declared a critical incident due to external IT issues which are widely affecting services including ours.
“This issue has affected Varian, the IT system we use to deliver radiotherapy treatments. This means we are currently unable to deliver our scheduled radiotherapy treatments. We have contacted our patients who were due to have radiotherapy this morning to reschedule appointments while we work to fix these issues.”
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