GPs and pharmacies still disrupted by IT outage

GPs and pharmacists say they continue to be affected by a global IT outage which caused chaos on Friday.

Surgeries across the country have had to cancel routine appointments because of the issue, while pharmacies have been unable to access digital prescription records.

Healthcare workers warned that, if the IT problems persist, the situation could get "much worse", with surgeries facing a growing backlog of missed appointments.

The outage - which also sparked major issues in the travel and banking sectors, among others - 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.

Asif Akram, who manages the White Rose Medical Practice in Barnsley, told the BBC that as of this morning he was still unable to log in to EMIS.

"We are hoping it will be up and running before Monday, otherwise the situation will get much worse," he said.

"If systems aren't working by Monday, we will have further appointment cancellations and a huge amount of catching up to do when systems return."

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His concerns were echoed by Dr Fari Ahmad - a GP based in Wilmslow in Cheshire - who told BBC Breakfast: "We couldn't do our routine stuff, so the implications for us is a lot of that's been bumped up.

"It's all going to build up, so there's going to be a lot more issues later on in the week."

An NHS England spokesman told the BBC that cancelled appointments "will be rescheduled in due course - there's no reason why they wouldn't be".

He stressed that patients "should attend appointments unless told otherwise".

In a statement, 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.