Cyberattack Leaves Doctors Unable To View Patient Notes

A cyberattack that has caused a major outage of NHS IT systems is expected to last for more than three weeks, leaving doctors unable to see patients’ notes, The Independent has learnt.

- Rebecca Thomas

Mental health trusts across the country will be left unable to access patient records for weeks, and possibly months. Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust has declared a critical incident over the outage and has told staff it is putting emergency plans in place.

One NHS chief said the situation could possibly last for “months” with several mental health trusts, and there was concern among leaders that the problem is not being prioritised. In an email to staff, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Nick Broughton, said: “The cyberattack targeted systems used to refer patients for care, including ambulances being dispatched, out-of-hours appointment bookings, triage, out-of-hours care, emergency prescriptions and safety alerts. It also targeted the finance system used by the trust.

“We have now been advised that we should prepare for a system outage that could continue for two weeks for Adastra and possibly longer than three weeks for Carenotes.” The note to staff on Tuesday added that the impact on services had, and would continue to be, “considerable” in the days ahead.