A cyber attack which caused a major disruption to NHS information systems is expected to last more than three weeks, leaving doctors unable to see patients’ notes, The Independent has learned.
Mental health trusts across the country will be left without access to patient notes for weeks, possibly months.
Oxford Health Foundation Trust declared a critical incident in relation to the outage, which is believed to be affecting dozens of trusts, and told staff it was putting emergency plans in place.
One NHS trust chief said the situation could go on for “months” with several mental health trusts and there was concern among leaders that the issue was not being prioritized.
In an email to staff, Oxford Health Foundation Trust chief executive Nick Broughton said: “The cyber attack targeted the systems used to refer patients for care, including ambulance dispatch, out-of-hours bookings, triage, out-of-hours care, emergency prescriptions and safety warnings. It also targeted the financial system used by the trust.
“We have now been advised to prepare for a system outage that could last two weeks for Adastra and possibly more than three weeks for Carenotes.”
The memo to staff on Tuesday added that the impact on services had been and would continue to be “significant” in the coming days.
He added: “Recovering from this cyber attack will take a huge amount of work and effort and plans are being put in place to deal with this.”
The trust said staff canceled their leave and worked through the night to try to resolve the issues.
The Independent understands that several similar memos have been shared with staff at other hospitals, with dozens of trusts affected.
The NHS director said: “The whole thing is downhill. It’s really worrying… we’re taking a lot of risk as a result because you can’t get records and details of assessments, prescriptions, key observations, mental health medical observations. You can’t see any of it… The staff will have to write it all down and enter it later.”
They added: “There is an increased risk to patients. It’s hard for us to release people, for example with housing providers, because we don’t have access to records.’
Last week it was revealed that NHS 111 and GP out-of-hours services had been hit by a cyber-attack against systems provided by Advanced called Adastra and Carenotes.
Carenotes is used by community mental health and children’s health services and The Independent has been told by several sources that around 30 NHS trusts are likely to have been affected.
On Friday, Advance chief operating officer Simon Short confirmed the incident was related to a cyber attack and said the company had taken steps to contain the attack, adding that “no other issues were found.”
Oxford Health FT told staff it was having “daily conversations” with leaders across the region to draw up mitigation plans.
One doctor in London said they were told the outage could even last “months” and that clinicians could not access or update their patients’ notes.
Another senior medic warned: “The risk arises from the inability of healthcare staff to access current patient risk assessments and past psychiatric histories.
“In a chronically underfunded area of medicine, resources are directed towards immediate risk management – this can only be done effectively if clinicians can triage individual patients based on known history and current risk assessment.”
According to reports in Pulse magazine last week, GPs in London were warned they could see an influx of patients sent by NHS 111 due to a “significant technical issue” and “system outage”.
The news follows a major IT crash at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Foundation Trust in London, which left clinicians without access to patient records and forced the trust to cancel patient appointments for days.
An NHS spokesman said: “While Advanced work to resolve their software issues, tried and tested emergency plans are in place across local health systems so the public should continue to use the NHS as normal.”
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