We live in a time where technology forms the backbone of critical service such as the NHS and last week they faced a significant hurdle with a global IT outage. This disruption reverberated through the healthcare system, affecting various essential functions. Amanda Pritchard, NHS Chief Executive recently shared a message where she discussed how the collective effort of NHS staff, particularly in general practice, played a crucial role in maintaining patient care during this challenging period.
Thank You NHS Staff
The sudden IT outage required quick thinking and agile responses from NHS teams. From finding innovative workarounds to ensuring that patient care remained uninterrupted, NHS staff demonstrated remarkable resilience and dedication. Amanda highlighted:
“Whether it was in finding workarounds to maintain safe patient care at trust and practice level, or in coordinating the response and recovery, the incident was another example of how NHS staff can react with real agility to unforeseen circumstances – but there is no question that it was sheer hard work that kept frontline services going.”
Recovery and Ongoing Impact
Although they have found a solution, the ripple effects of the outage are expected to linger. The disruption impacted not only the direct delivery of healthcare services but also the supply chain, necessitating additional efforts to catch up on missed appointments, repeat prescriptions, and other primary care requests. Amanda went onto say:
“Incidents of this nature, particularly where they disrupt features of everyday life like travel, health or finances, quite rightly raise concerns about the fragility of IT systems and the diversity of the market for them.”
Volatility of IT Systems
Amanda’s message serves as a crucial reminder of the need for robust continuity plans across all healthcare settings. While global incidents are beyond the NHS’s control, preparedness can mitigate their impact. On the subject of the IT issues, Amanda closed with this statement:
“Whilst the NHS clearly cannot prevent global incidents like this happening, we can ensure we are as prepared as possible to respond if and when issues occur – so please do use this as a prompt to check that you have robust and up-to-date business continuity plans in every kind of setting.”
Even with solutions in place, it’s still going to take some time to fully recover from the outage. But, in time, and hopefully with redundancy and contingency plans in place, these kind of issues can be avoided in future.