A global IT outage that caused chaos on Friday continues to impact GPs and pharmacists, with surgeries cancelling routine appointments and pharmacies unable to access digital prescription records. Healthcare workers are warning that if the IT problems persist, the situation could get “much worse”, with surgeries facing a growing backlog of missed appointments. The outage also sparked major issues in the travel and banking sectors, among others.
The fault was caused by a faulty update to Crowdstrike antivirus software, which crashed Microsoft systems. Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said the issue had been fixed on Friday, but admitted that it could take “some time” for some computer systems to be restored. Among the platforms affected is EMIS, which many GPs use to manage appointment bookings and patient records – including sending prescriptions to pharmacies.
This meant GPs could not access medical records or give patients the results of recent tests, while any prescriptions had to be filled out on paper. Many surgeries reverted to offering only emergency appointments. An NHS England spokesman said cancelled appointments “will be rescheduled in due course – there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be” and stressed that patients “should attend appointments unless told otherwise”.
Nick Kaye, chairman of the National Pharmacy Association, said that community pharmacies’ digital systems were “by and large back online” but that disruption was expected to continue as the outage had caused backlogs in processing prescriptions. Earlier, his deputy Olivier Picard said pharmacies were facing “continuous problems”, having not been able to receive digital prescription issued after the outage occurred
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