HSE warns of further 'widespread' cancellations due to cyberattack

Emergency departments are still very busy due to the loss of IT equipment, while hospital, community and screening services are still affected.

The HSE is warning patients to expect "widespread cancellations" of hospital appointments again next week.

Some computer systems have been restored after the cyberattack ten days ago, but most have not been yet.

Emergency departments are still very busy due to the loss of IT equipment, while hospital, community and screening services are still affected.

The HSE's chief operations officer, Anne O'Connor, says the disruption will continue for a long time.

"We're trying to still assess the impact of the attack, and then to restore some of our systems across the country," says Ms O'Connor.

"What this means is that we're going to continue to have widespread cancellations, particularly in relation to outpatients, and outpatient radiology.

"We expect many services to have cancellations next week; we know that it is going to be into next week and possibly weeks after that before some of these systems are restored."

One hospital group is cancelling about 20,000 appointments as a result of the ransomware attack.

Tony Canavan, chief executive of the Saolta Group which manages seven hospitals in the west and north-west says several services are affected.

Last week, it resulted in the cancellation of approximately 10,000 appointments for patients, and it's likely to hit the same kind of numbers again for this week," says Mr Canavan 

"All outpatient activity is cancelled, access to outpatient diagnostics is cancelled, a number of elective surgical procedures are cancelled, elective endoscopy is being cancelled unless the patient hears directly by phone from the hospital and that'll only happen in a very small number of cases."

Meanwhile, Ms O’Connor has said staff have been told they can turn on devices but not use them, but it was “a bit away” from connecting them to servers.

The HSE's chief operations officer, Anne O'Connor, says the disruption will continue for a long time.

Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Ms O’Connor said that 13 days after the cyberattack some progress had been made, but it was site-specific with a major reduction in services in hospitals in the west and the south of the country.

As of Tuesday night, 80,000 devices in the health service had been plugged in and to which protection was now being deployed. This was hugely important, she said as email access was vital for clinicians.

Voluntary hospitals were resuming services, but systems were still “very compromised” for radiotherapy and laboratory facilities, she added.

Laboratories were operating under 20% capacity and a lot of samples sent by GPs were just not being tested.

“That’s a concern for us.” The problem for outpatients was the lack of access to previous records. If a patient presented today they were going to be treated as a new patient as there was no access to their previous treatments, medications etc., explained Ms O’Connor.

The large voluntary hospitals in Dublin had resumed outpatient treatment, but only 40% of outpatients nationally would be seen this week. Normally the HSE would treat 14,000 outpatients per day. With inpatients, only 50% were being admitted, she said, those who most needed to be admitted. “We are bringing people in on the basis of urgency.” The health service was continuing to function, she said, but it was operating in a different way.

The main concern was cancer services which had resumed in St Luke’s hospital in Dublin and at its branches in St James and Blanchardstown hospitals. Cancer care sites in Galway and Cork had not yet reopened and people from Galway were having to travel to Dublin for treatment, which was not ideal, she said.

When asked about the reporting of the rollout of the vaccine programme, Ms O’Connor explained that the system for communicating such figures from GPs was not operating at present, but that the actual operation of the vaccine programme had not been impacted by the cyberattack.

The priority for the HSE continued to be to get radiotherapy and laboratory facilities back up and running and to provide critical patient care, she said.