Our NHS Heroes ensure minimal disruption following cyber attack
Written by John Williamson on 15/05/2017
The computer systems at Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust are now back up and running thanks to incredible dedication from our teams throughout the weekend.
Our eHealth teams worked around the clock over the weekend to ensure that the fix that had been applied on Friday following the attack was robustly tested and we were able to restart computers on Monday morning.
Our clinical teams operated under their business continuity plans which also proved robust and we are grateful for the public’s patience during this time as some things took a little longer than normal.
All of our services are now back up and running with minimal disruption. Unfortunately as a result of this a small number of clinics have had to be been rearranged. Our teams are still under pressure as they input the paper records from over the weekend so we continue to ask for the public’s patience.
Some services in other parts of the health system are still affected and we are working with partners to ensure that they are up and running safely as soon as possible.
Farouq Din, interim Associate Director of eHealth said:
“I cannot express the gratitude enough to the teams who worked tirelessly to ensure we could start up again on Monday morning. The partnership working across the Cumbrian health system was fabulous and while in some organisations they are not yet up and running we are all working together to ensure minimal disruption for patients.
“CPFT had applied the server update in accordance with guidance and we are confident that this was one of the reasons that the virus was easily contained for our Trust. Out of our 180 servers only three were affected.
“The Trust is confident that we are fully protected against the Ransomware virus and any new variant of that virus and all patient information was protected.“
Clare Parker, Director of Quality and Nursing, said:
“The response from staff to this issue has been incredible. They all understood the seriousness of the issue and without hesitation implemented their business continuity plans. “This included reverting back to pen and paper in many cases. The way they carried on calmly in every area was a testament to their dedication to our patients. I am extremely proud of the way our staff handled this incident.
“We will now be setting up a recovery management team to ensure all lessons are learned and shared and that all systems across the county are running as expected.”
The three servers that were affected at CPFT held what is known as non-critical information and did not contain any patient data. We have found no evidence of patient data being lost and there has been no major damage other than the need to have our systems down for a 48hr period.
Only a small number of PCs & desktops were infected on CPFT sites. These have now all been isolated and are being reformatted.
Our NHS partners are also working to recover their systems so please be mindful that they may also be experiencing some disruption.
