Third of England’s pharmacy drug supplies hit by global IT outage, officials say

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A global IT outage hit one-third of drug deliveries to pharmacies in England as chaos impacted on thousands of GP practices and hospitals across the country declared critical incidents.

GPs, pharmacies and NHS 111 services across the country suffered major disruption on Friday after an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed Microsoft Windows systems.

The IT bug hit the Emis IT system used by around 60 per cent of GP practices – 3,700 – to access patient records, book appointments and issue prescriptions.

According to the National Pharmacy Association, one-third of deliveries in pharmacies across England were hit on Friday after a major wholesaler declared it had been affected by the issues.

Although deliveries have resumed in many areas, the issue is expected to impact pharmacies into early next week, it said on Saturday.

Meanwhile, several NHS services nationwide, including five NHS trusts, were forced to declare critical incidents due to the disruption.

Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Independent Pharmacy Association, told The Independent that pharmacies were more worried about the lack of access to patient prescriptions than supply issues. She said if patients needed urgent prescriptions, pharmacies have been told to refer them to NHS 111.

Nick Kaye, chair of the National Pharmacy Association which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, said on Saturday that systems were largely back online and medicine deliveries had resumed in many pharmacies.

However, he said: “Yesterday’s outage will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.”

The Independent understands at least eight critical incidents were raised yesterday, including by Barts Health NHS Trust, Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford Health Foundation Trust and Chesterfield Hospital Foundation Trust.

Officials covering the London region, Cheshire and Merseyside and out-of-hours services in East Berkshire also declared incidents.

Chief executive of London Ambulance Service Daniel Elkeles said on Friday that its call handlers and ambulance crew were busy with “huge” increases in the number of calls to 999 and NHS 111 services.

By 2pm on Friday, it had received 3,000 999 calls and 3,000 111 services – a third higher than it would usually receive in 24 hours.

NHS services in London were already facing huge disruption following a cyberattack last month which hit pathology systems used by hospitals and GP practices in south London. As a result of that cyberattack, thousands of patient appointments have been cancelled.

Specialist cancer hospital The Christie in Greater Manchester reported that under a third of its patients were impacted on Friday.

Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust said on Friday morning that radiotherapy treatments at its hospitals had also been impacted by the outage. It declared a critical incident, saying it was “currently unable to deliver our scheduled radiotherapy treatments”.

On Friday, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “Our members are telling us that today’s outage is causing considerable disruption to GP practice bookings and IT systems – practices using Emis IT systems appear to be particularly affected.

“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.”