NHS counts cost af ter being hit by cyber raids
HOSPITALS are braced for mayhem today as the NHS tries to get back on its feet after last week’s crippling cyber attack.
Patients could be forced to wait weeks to see a doctor as the health service scrambles to rearrange countless operations cancelled over the weekend.
The worst-hit organisations will continue to postpone non-emergency operations today as IT experts work round the clock to get their systems back online.
Seven hospitals across England were last night still diverting ambulances away from their A&E departments, while GPs in some parts of the country have been told not to switch on their computers this morning until they are given the all-clear.
Only three hospitals are known to have been affected north of the Border, but dozens of GP practices were left without vital computers.
The NHS is now thought to be protected against further attack by the virus because IT staff have been working over the weekend to boost defences, with Scots IT experts ‘patching’ the system.
The biggest impact will come as hospital bosses try to reschedule the countless appointments and operations that were cancelled on Friday and over the weekend.
At the moment, the NHS is telling patients with a hospital appointment to attend unless they are contacted and told not to.
But with the NHS already running close to capacity and waiting times at an all-time high, some patients will find themselves waiting for weeks before they are seen by a doctor.
When contacted yesterday, all of Scotland’s 14 health boards said systems were patched up over the weekend, with some IT engineers working around the clock, and it would be ‘business as usual’ today.
The cyber-attacks affected two surgeries each at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Dumfries and Galloway and NHS Grampian. NHS Forth Valley had three GP surgeries affected and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde saw five surgeries hit by hackers.
Both NHS Fife and NHS Tayside said ‘a small group’ of surgeries were affected’. But all said at no point was patient data compromised.
The worst hit trust was NHS Lanarkshire, which was forced to cancel operations at acute district general hospitals Monklands, Hairmyres and Wishaw.
Officials expect the most urgent cases to be postponed by no more than a day or two, but less urgent cases will go to the back of the queue and may not be seen for a month or more.
Dr Krishna Chinthapalli, a registrar at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, said the next attack could be worse.
He said: ‘Healthcare remains vulnerable and, if anything, this one will raise awareness among the hacker community that hospitals are a target for them. This could just be the beginning.’
One teenage hacker last night claimed he had managed to access patient records on NHS websites in less than an hour.
Speaking to Sky News on the condition of anonymity, he described the defences protecting the confidential details of thousands of patients as ‘vulnerable to basic attacks that have been around for years’.
‘This could just be the beginning’