Another WEEK of GP disruption predicted after Microsoft outage

Patients could struggle to get appointments, prescriptions and test results this week due to the ongoing fallout from Microsoft‘s global outage on Friday.

NHS bosses, medics and pharmacists said while the worst of the crisis was behind them they expect the backlog from the outage, which grounded flights, health systems and some businesses to a halt last week, to impact services for some time. 

Some patients, including those with cancer, have also had vital surgeries delayed by up to a week due to surgeons being unable to perform operations on Friday.

It comes as patient groups told MailOnline the whole fiasco had shown the fragility of the ‘digital first’ approach to health services, and it was ‘crazy’ no back-up plans had been in place before the outage.

They said patients were likely still trying to navigate lengthy GP telephone queues today to find out what has happened to cancelled appointments and test results.

While GP practices bore the brunt of last week’s global IT failure, with two thirds thought to have been brought to a standstill, NHS hospitals weren’t immune with chemotherapy and radiotherapy services also hit. 

Some patients even told this website they were unable to get supplies of life-saving medication.  

But an NHS England spokesperson said the brunt of the crisis had now been resolved. 

‘Systems are now back online, and patients with an NHS appointment this week should continue to attend unless told not to,’ they said. 

However, they added delays are still expected.  

‘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,’ they said.

Doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), also said GP services were likely to be impacted for some time due to a backlog of cases. 

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of union’s GP Committee, said: ‘Friday was one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England. 

‘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.’

GP services up and down the country were hit by the Microsoft outage hard due to their reliance on the EMIS system.

This system is used by family doctors to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals.

Some 3,700 GP practices in England are thought to have been affected by the outage, roughly about two thirds of nation’s primary care providers. 

Dr Wrigley said the fallout from the problems will likely disrupt GP services for some time​.

‘The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has meant a considerable backlog,’ he said. 

‘Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday GPs would still need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend, and NHS England should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately.’

He added that the BMA was now calling for EMIS, the company which operates the system of the same name, and NHS bosses to urgently work on ‘securing a better system of IT backup so that this disaster is not repeated in future’.

Nick Kaye, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, who represent independent community pharmacies in the UK, also said their services would also likely be hit by the backlog. 

‘As pharmacists recover from last week’s IT outage and catch up on the backlog of prescriptions, we expect service in some community pharmacies to be slower than usual today,’ he said. 

‘Please be patient with your local pharmacy team if you are visiting them, as they may still be prioritising emergency prescriptions from their local GP surgeries as well as experiencing increased demand as services return to normal.’

Dennis Reed, of Silver Voices, a patient campaign group for senior Brits which has advocated for better access to GPs, said ongoing disruption demonstrated the perils of the NHS over-relying on a ‘digital first’ service.

‘It shows the fragment and archaic of the NHS computer systems,’ he said. 

‘It seems to me to be a systematic lack of resilience, if it takes the rest of this week to get things back to normal it shows that they don’t have any emergency plans in place for this sort of thing.

‘The over-dependence of digital health has seen those chickens come home to roost.’ 

He added that it was ‘crazy’ for the NHS to not have a back system in place for such IT disruption.  

‘There were doctors available, receptionists available, but it wasn’t possible to book appointments because people don’t know how to use manual records anymore, so if computer doesn’t work, 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 sorted out so that it never happens again.’ 

Mr Reed said many patients will still be trying to contact their GP to find out what has happened to appointments and tests for conditions or symptoms that care causing them worry amid the ongoing disruption. 

‘This will cause immense disruption to patients,’ he said. 

‘They’ll have had their appointments cancelled and are probably still trying to get through on the telephone to try and find out what’s going on.

‘It shows, again, that it’s really hard to get a speedy and timely service from the NHS these days.’

He echoed calls from the BMA for the rapid introduction of backup system for GP services to minimise such disruption in the future saying it was ‘long before time’ such a failsafe was introduced.

NHS England was unable to prove any data on how many appointments and treatments had been affected by Friday’s IT outage. 

One patient who had their appointment cancelled was Chantelle Mooney, 41, who was due to undergo major surgery to remove a golf-ball sized mass on her brain.

Ms Mooney was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which spread to her lungs.

She was then told three weeks ago that a 4cm mass had also been found in her brain – after she started experiencing weakness down one side.

Ms Mooney arrived at Royal Preston Hospital, Lancashire, on Friday morning, expecting to go into surgery at 10am.

But she said her surgeon told her the operation could be delayed due to the Microsoft outage with medics relying on its software for scans, emergency medication, accessing medical records and more.

After spending the morning waiting to see if the issue would be solved, Ms Mooney was told at 1.30pm that the surgery would not be going ahead and was going to be pushed back to next Friday.

She’s likely not alone with MailOnline aware other cancer patients, some with late stage cancer having to have their chemotherapy appointments rescheduled.  

The IT fault, which started late on Thursday night, caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to suddenly turn off at airports, grounding flights and knocking TV channels, and banks offline. 

Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologising for the ‘disruption’ to the service at 6am on Friday when broadcasting was meant to begin.

It read: ‘We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.’

Airline Ryanair was also seemingly hit with the issue after it posted on its website urging passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a ‘third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network’.

Flights continued being hit today with dozens more journeys cancelled at airports across England

Ten flights were axed at Heathrow today as well as 11 at London City, ten at Gatwick and six at Manchester as airlines battled to try to get schedules back to normal.

A total of 38 flights were cancelled at England’s airports throughout the day, with British Airways and easyJet making up the majority with 18 and 10 respectively.

Arrivals from European cities such as Rome, Berlin and Zurich were among those axed as were others from Jamaica and US cities including Las Vegas and New York.

US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted that a flawed update from them was responsible for the error behind the outage.  

Microsoft itself said CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5million Windows devices.

The firm said this was equivalent to less than 1 per cent of all Windows machines.

‘While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,’ it said in a statement.

‘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 tech ecosystem to prioritise operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist.’

CrowdStrike’ boss George Kurtz has apologised the problems caused by the update saying he is ‘deeply sorry’ and made clear it was ‘not a security or cyber incident’.