NHS England London has released the latest data update on the clinical impact of the ransomware cyber attack against pathology services provider Synnovis on Monday 3 June.

The data for the ninth week of the attack (29 July – 4 August), shows that across the two most affected trusts, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, 578 acute outpatient appointments and 20 elective procedures had to be postponed because of the attack.

This means so far 1,680 elective procedures and 10,001 acute outpatient appointments have been postponed at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust since 3rd June.

Progress on rebuilding systems

More than 60 core IT systems used within laboratories are being, or have been, entirely rebuilt with Synnovis completing the restoration of an increasing number of these. This means that available capacity at Synnovis’ laboratory network has returned to higher levels of capacity (excluding blood transfusion), with specimen processing volumes expected to increase as activity is either recommenced or redirected back to Synnovis over coming weeks.

Testing is underway to repatriate pathology services used by primary and community care in south east London (including GPs) from existing mutual aid arrangements back to Synnovis, with this planned to take place from this month.

Once repatriated to Synnovis, GPs and other service users will regain access to the same tests and volumes of pre-cyber attack.

Full restoration of blood transfusion services remains planned for early autumn, meaning that mutual aid will continue to be required for planned operations and transplants to minimise the ongoing impact on patients.

Dr Jane Fryer, Deputy Medical Director for NHS London, said: 

“Synnovis’ steady rebuild of its core systems remains on track, with the upcoming move of GP services back to Synnovis a significant milestone. However, with this incident now running for more than two months we are very conscious of the continued impact on some of our patients whose appointments are not able to go ahead as planned. We also want to thank staff for continuing to work flexibly and resourcefully during this period, to make sure we keep rescheduled appointments to a minimum.

“With most services working at near-normal levels, including in outpatients, day cases and non-elective care, it’s important that patients with booked appointments continue to attend unless they have been contacted to say otherwise.”

Strong response to amber alert but call for O group donors continues

Demand for O type blood from hospitals has increased due to both the cyber attack and a reduction in donations during the summer period.

O negative and O positive donors are still asked to urgently book and fill appointments at donor centres. People can visit blood.co.uk or call 0300 123 23 23 to book an appointment.

Mark Croucher, Assistant Director of Donor Experience said:

“We’ve seen an amazing response to our appeal after announcing an amber alert two weeks ago. We are incredibly thankful to our donors for their support and we need people to keep booking appointments in the coming weeks and months.

“There are around 50,000 appointments every week and while we have seen an increase in fill rates the past week, we do see a sharp drop in coming weeks so we’d urge you to please book ahead.”

Advice for the public

NHS organisations across London continue to work in partnership to ensure people receive the critical and urgent care they need, when they need it. Advice to the public remains:

1. Continue to attend booked appointments unless contacted to say otherwise. Patients will be kept informed about any changes to their treatment by the NHS organisation caring for them. This will be through the usual contact routes including texts, phone calls and letters.
2. Continue to use NHS 111 through the NHS App, online or on the phone for non-urgent care.
3. Urgent and emergency services continue to be available to those who need emergency care and people should access services in the normal way by dialling 999 in an emergency.
4. Patients waiting on blood tests are advised to keep an eye on Swiftqueue, the online booking service, as more appointments become available.

As more detail becomes available through Synnovis’ full investigation, the NHS will continue to provide updates.

A helpline has been set up to support people affected (incident helpline: 0345 8778967). More details on the incident, including a questions and answers section, are also available on the NHS England website: https://www.england.nhs.uk/synnovis-cyber-incident

 

Background

NHS London impact update based on provisional data reported by trusts and organisations involved.

Please note all numbers quoted are drawn from unvalidated management information; these have been provided in the interests of transparency.

Updates will be provided on a weekly basis as the incident continues.

The update shows that for the week 29th July – 4th August 2024.

 

Planned care (day case and inpatient treatments)

Across Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts there have been:

• 20 elective procedures postponed (there were 52 cancellations for the week commencing 22nd July).
• 3 of these were cancer treatments (compared to 2 for w/c 22nd July)

It is too early to understand the impact on 62-day performance and or Faster Diagnosis Standard for the affected trusts.

 

Transplant impacts

0 organs were diverted for use by other Trusts (compared to 1 last week).

 

Maternity

Across Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts:

Zero planned C-sections have been postponed/rescheduled in the last week (compared to zero the week before).

 

Outpatients

Across Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts there have been:

578 hospital outpatient appointments were postponed in the last week (compared to 1,074 for the week 22-28 July)

0 community outpatient appointments have been postponed in the last week (compared to 28 last week).

 

Blood tests
Capacity across south east London pathology services continues to increase.

*Due to data verification issues, this week’s percentage figure will be provided in the next update.

 

Primary care
Primary care appointments are going ahead as normal, however blood tests are being prioritised based on clinical need.

Following the introduction of mutual aid arrangements, under which pathology services are temporarily being supplied to primary care users by other providers, all GP practices now have access to testing services for patients needing non-routine tests.

Normal services are operating for histology (a diagnosis and study of the tissues which are used to diagnose infections, cancer and other diseases) and cervical smears.

 

Wider impact

Synnovis provides specialist tests for other hospitals in the country. However, the material service impact remains in south east London. Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust remain in a critical incident, while Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Bromley Healthcare, and primary care services in south east London continues to be significantly impacted and involved in the incident response.