GPs need time to recover from global IT outage, warns BMA NI chair

The trade union for doctors said GPs will have to deal with the backlog this coming week and that “patience” will be required for those ringing their GP.

A flawed update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many services offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling some healthcare systems.

A fix was deployed for a bug in the update, which affected equipment running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as CrowdStrike's chief executive George Kurtz said it would take "some time" for systems to be fully restored.

Microsoft said CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices – less than 1% of all the corporation’s machines.

Across Northern Ireland, an estimated two-thirds of GP surgeries reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records as their EMIS system went down.

Speaking about the effects of the global IT outage on primary care, Dr Frances O’Hagan, chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland GP committee, said: “Tomorrow will be a particularly busy day for our GP surgeries as we deal with the aftermath of this outage.

“A key online system we rely upon to access and update patients’ clinical records went down, causing a considerable backlog of work that will now have to dealt with in this coming week.

“This will of course put considerable strain on general practice, however, staff will continue to provide care to the best of their ability. Whilst these systems return online, I would appeal to anyone accessing their GP to be patient while staff do their upmost to address this backlog of work.

“To ensure such an outage does not have a similar impact in the future, one that forced many surgeries to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients, we would call for more investment from the Department of Health in contingency planning and recovery plans.”