UK GPs will take time to recover from Crowdstrike outage, says BMA

Commenting on the aftermath of Friday’s Crowdstrike outage, Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of GPC England at the BMA, said:

“Friday was one the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England. Without a clinical IT system many were forced to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients. While GPs and their teams worked hard to look after as many as they could, without access to the information they needed much of the work has had to be shifted into the coming week.

“GPs have been pulling out all the stops this weekend to deal with the effects of Friday's catastrophic loss of service, and as their IT systems come back online we thank them and their staff for their hard work under exceptionally trying circumstances. We also thank patients for bearing with general practice in this unprecedented situation.

“The temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has meant a considerable backlog. Even if we could guarantee it could be fully fixed on Monday GPs would still need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend, and NHSE should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately.

“The BMA’s GP committee will continue our dialogue with both EMIS and NHSE, both to make sure that the coming week can be used to recover as quickly as possible and to urgently work on securing a better system of IT backup so that this disaster is not repeated in future.”