England’s health bookings system down but emergency services working, NHS says

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LONDON (Reuters) – England’s National Health Service (NHS) said a global tech outage on Friday had disrupted the booking of doctors’ appointments and patient records, but emergency services had not been affected.

The outage, which has been linked to cyber security firm Crowdstrike and its impact on the operation of Microsoft Windows, hit operations in multiple industries around the world, from airlines to banking and broadcasting.

NHS England said it was aware of an issue with its EMIS patient and record system following the outage, “which is causing disruption in the majority of GP (family doctor) practices.”

“The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP,” an NHS spokesperson said.

“There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would.”

The Labour Party won a national election earlier this month, and new health minister Wes Streeting has said the NHS is “broken” and ordered an independent investigation into the state of the health service.

He is also in talks with junior doctors to end strikes which the previous government said undermined efforts to cut long waiting lists.

Adding to the list of issues, the NHS was hit by a cyber attack last month impacting a lab that processes blood test results, disrupting thousands of appointments and operations.

A UK government security source said that Friday’s global outage was not being treated as a malicious act.

NHS England added that patients should attend appointments that had already been booked as usual, but only contact their doctor if it was urgent.