GP surgery warns thousands of patients of impaired services amid NHS cyber attack

Maria Lawton, practice manager at Hall Green Surgery, has sent out a message to warn patients that the organisation has lost 90 per cent of all its computers and that an emergency plan has been put in place.

Following the attack, which has been ongoing since Friday, all patients are being urged not to contact the surgery unless it is an urgent medical matter.

Ms Lawton posted : "Due to the severity of the damage we have no working computers in any clinician consulting rooms or reception areas which limits access to patient records , appointments etc. This will mean that on Monday and for most likely the whole week we,the staff and clinicians at our practice, will be under increased pressure to care for our patients.. We have been working all weekend to try and fix the damage but due to the cyber attack taking out the majority of our GP surgeries computers, our central IT department simply cannot reach every practice to get them back up and running .

The N3 connection at the surgery has been switched off until the threat of the cyber attack has been completely resolved resulting in the loss of phones, fax, laboratory contact, electronic patient records and ECG monitoring.

She added: "Please be assured that all patient records have been unaffected and there has not been a confidentiality breach. This cyber attack added a fast spreading virus from computer to computer shutting them down but did not access any records.

"Please can all patients, carers and service users of Hall Green Surgery pass this onto as many of your friends, relatives etc that use our practice : Please be patient, if you do not require to be seen urgently tomorrow or if you do not need to contact the surgery for anything that is not urgent , please do not contact us as we will be working extremely hard to deal with urgent cases and emergencies only. If you have a routine appointment please attend as normal but please be aware of possible delays. I have put extra staff on to assist however we are very limited due to having no access to our computers.

"Due to the limit of computer access I cannot put this message on our practice website yet so I hope social media will step in to help me support my staff, clinicians and patients during this time to pass my message on."