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

Normal GP service “cannot be resumed immediately” after Friday’s global IT outage caused a “considerable backlog”, the British Medical Association has warned.

The trade union for doctors said GPs would “need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend”, adding that NHS England should “make clear to patients” this was the case.

The British Medical Association (BMA) said its GP committee would continue to talk to NHS England and patient record system supplier EMIS to secure a “better system of IT backup” to ensure the “disaster” was not repeated.

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.

Across England, GP surgeries reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records on Friday as their EMIS system went down.

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chairman of GPC England, the representative body for GPs at the BMA, said: “Friday was one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England. Without a clinical IT system many were forced to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients.

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