Expect ongoing delays this week (Image: Getty) NHS England has issued a warning about potential "delays" as the health service attempts to recover from Friday's worldwide IT outage. Despite this, patients with appointments scheduled for this week have been advised to "should continue to attend unless told not to". This follows a cautionary statement from the British Medical Association (BMA) on Sunday, stating that normal GP services "cannot be resumed immediately" due to the "considerable backlog" caused by the outage.
The doctors' trade union emphasised that GPs would require time to catch up on the work lost over the weekend and urged NHS England to communicate this clearly to patients. The BMA also revealed that its GP committee is in ongoing discussions with NHS England and EMIS, the patient record system supplier, to establish a more robust IT backup system to prevent a recurrence of such a "disaster". The global disruption was triggered by a faulty update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which resulted in numerous services going offline worldwide on Friday, leading to flight and train cancellations and severely impacting some healthcare systems.
CrowdStrike's CEO, George Kurtz, announced that a fix had been deployed for the bug in the update, which affected devices running the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, he warned it would take "some time" for systems to be fully restored. function loadOvpScript(){let el=document.
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