Hospitals operating in 'environment of extreme and high risk' due to cyberattack

Delays at Cork University Hospital include a 10-hour turnaround for blood results which would normally take two hours. Picture Dan Linehan

Public hospitals are continuing to operate in an “environment of extreme and high risk” as the impact of the cyberattack continues, HSE chief executive Paul Reid has warned.

For three weeks now, the attack has reduced communication between and inside hospitals, with staff unable to access records and data systems.

The impact on Cork University Hospital (CUH) was highlighted by the HSE's chief operations officer Anne O’Connor.

She said emergency department activity there is back to 2019 levels, with 260 attendances on Thursday and 92 patients admitted. All 260 attendances had to have paper records generated.

A 10-hour turnaround for blood results which would normally take two hours also slowed staff down.

Radiotherapy has resumed, but while normally up to 160 cancer patients are treated every week, now they are seeing about 90 in partnership with local private facilities.

“Scheduled care has continued at 60 to 70% capacity with a focus on time-critical cases,” Ms O’Connor said.

However, where there is a requirement to have recent laboratory, pathology, and radiology imaging, these cases have been deferred.

Separately, Professor Conor Deasy, emergency medicine consultant at CUH, yesterday asked the public to only attend the emergency department in urgent cases.

He warned “long delays are unfortunately inevitable” and urged people to use options including GPs or pharmacists instead.

Mr Reid said workarounds to cope with the impacts of the cyberattack across almost 2,000 health service systems are in place.

But he added: “Every action they [staff] take every minute of every day carries enormous risk in the current environment.” 

He said staff are doubling up so that they can check data and test results before this is manually recorded to improve accuracy.

The HSE is still monitoring the release of patient data online. 

So far the release of 520 patients' information, which was reported last week, is the only confirmed incident, Mr Reid said.

“We continue to monitor websites to check for any data we believe may have been stolen … as part of the cyberattack,” he said.

Looking at the national picture, Ms O’Connor said: “We still have significant delays across all of our services.” 

Scans can be done at 44 sites but seven remain affected, and just 23 laboratories are connected even internally.

Endoscopy services remain limited with 32 sites still “severely impacted”, she said.

So far, 1,002 out of 4,750 larger devices have been decrypted and 42,978 or 49% of end-user devices are now connected.

Online communication with GPs will start to be restored from this week. 

Mental health services, she said, remain “severely impacted” and managers have reported high occupancy in community units.

A range of other services including communications with Tusla, dental, audiology, ophthalmology, and social inclusion services are affected. 

Anyone applying for a new medical card is being asked to do so by paper.