The impact of the recent cyber attack on IT systems at Synnovis has caused a “massive effect” on pathology services in London. The attack has resulted in staff being asked to only process “clinically critical” samples which has caused delays in blood tests. Pathology services have been affected at King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, including the Royal Brompton and the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, as well as primary care services. A critical incident was declared on 4 June which affected services including blood transfusions and test results.
NHS teams are “planning” and “prioritising” patient care as well as “coping through Covid which was a major situation, so hopefully we will get through this”, according to Dr Abdul Kamali. Synnovis reported that it had “put additional resources in place” so that samples received from GPs or hospitals could be processed “within appropriate timeframes”. However, the company is only able to process 400 blood samples a day from the impacted trusts and can only accept samples which the requesting clinician considers to be ‘clinically critical’.
The inability to track tests that have not been processed and the inability to respond to individual queries about the status of samples has created additional challenges through the processing of tests. Dr Kamali has commented that “doing a test and having to repeat it has an impact on resources. Without test results, diagnoses can’t be made, treatments can’t be given, so it has had a massive impact for patients coming into the surgery as well as going to hospital.”
A spokesperson for Synnovis confirmed that after the cyber attack, some unprocessed blood samples were discarded as they were “no longer suitable for analysis”. The cyber-attack is believed to have been carried out by a Russian group calling themselves Qilin. Prof Dee Thiruchelvam, chief nursing officer at NHS Blood and Transplant, said manual checks of blood took longer to process than the computerised system and encouraged donors to come forward, particularly O negative and O positive donors
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