NHS England has said that digital systems are now back online following disruption caused by the global IT outage at the end of last week.
This follows the health service having been hit – notably GP systems – in the outage that affected a range of industries following a bug in a software update by anti-virus provider Crowdstrike.
An NHS England spokesperson 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.”
Northern Ireland’s Department of Health (DoH) has also issued a statement stating that all teams have implemented business continuity plans and that the core Epic electronic care record system, although being hit by the outage, was quickly brought back to operational state.
Its EMIS GP system was also brought back online.
Minimal impact
DoH said: “It will take some time to ascertain exactly what the operational impact of the outages were, as services recover from Friday’s issues. Initial assessments are that there has been minimal impact or cancellation to patient care in hospitals.
“The sorts of impacts that are beginning to be returned include: theatres and scopes continued but delayed start time for radiotherapy clinics and some theatre timing slots, and some issues with respect to staffing over the weekend but these were mitigated and workarounds put in place.”
Digital Health and Care Wales said that all services are now running as normal but that some local operations may be experiencing a “residual impact”.
There has been no statement from NHS Scotland, but STV news reported some disruption.
Various local authorities have also reported issues caused by the outage.
