NHS Delays Continue After Windows Outage

NHS patients should expect delays into this week following the worldwide outage affecting Microsoft Windows computers, a medical body has warned.

The outage, caused by a faulty update to CrowdStrike’s computer security software, affected more than 8 million systems, of which many will need to be brought back online manually.

CrowdStrike said on Monday a “significant” number of affected systems had been fixed.

Critical services, including the NHS, are now dealing with a backlog caused by the incident that will take time to clear, said the British Medical Association (BMA).

Patient backlog

“Friday was one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England,” said Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of GPC England, which represents GPs at the BMA.

“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.”

A “considerable” backlog had built up due to the temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system used by GPs, 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,” Wrigley said.

Travel delays

People dialling the NHS’ 111 service for non-emergency health advice were told information given to handlers might not be passed along to the hospitals or clinics callers were told to visit due to the outage.

The NHS asked people with appointments this week to attend as normal unless told otherwise.

“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,” a spokesperson said.

The outage continued to snarl travel services, with bad weather contributing to cancelled flights in and out of the UK on Sunday and Monday.

No-frills airline Wizz Air said its systems were up and running but that flight schedules would take “some time to return to normal”.