GPs to seek compensation for ‘catastrophic’ disruption caused by global IT outage

GP practices have been encouraged to seek compensation via their ICB for the ‘catastrophic’ disruption caused by a global IT outage, which ‘forced them to return to pen and paper’.

GPs are facing a ‘considerable backlog’ and continued disruption this week following the outage on Friday, which GP leaders said was ‘one of the toughest single days in recent times’ for general practice.

The problems were caused by a ‘defect’ at cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, and impacted practices’ ability to book and consult with patients. 

EMIS, which stopped working for a ‘majority’ of GP practices last week, was restored over the weekend and NHS England has said all GP systems ‘are now back online’. 

However, the BMA’s GP Committee warned that practices ‘still need time to catch up from lost work’ and called on NHS England to make clear to patients ‘that normal service cannot be resumed immediately’.

The failure of EMIS had knock-on effects for other systems such as Accurx, but GPCE chair Dr Katie-Bramall Stainer said on Saturday that the NHS App, GP Connect and pathology results were all back up running as usual. 

In a post on X, she said: ‘Cost up everything and send invoice to ICB and cc the LMC.’

Manchester LMC chief executive Dr Simon Minkoff also told GPs to question what ‘compensation’ they might need in order to ‘catch up’.

In a thread on X, he said he is considering ‘extra sessions to catch up’ from the disruption on Friday, including time to process ‘documents, labs, scripts, the deferred appointments’, as well as for entering consultations that were not recorded using EMIS on the day. 

Dr Minkoff added: ‘Otherwise it’s business as usual and a constant backlog due to circumstances out of our control. General practice was placed in this position, did not create it, is a victim of it alongside its patients.’ 

Dr Ankit Kant, a GP in King’s Lynn, has created an invoice template for practices to send to the ICB for the ‘EMIS failure’, via his AI assistant website.

The invoice requests compensation to cover the costs of ‘administrative overheads’, staff time spent dealing with the disruption, and ‘potential loss of revenue from cancelled or rescheduled appointments’.

GPCE deputy chair Dr David Wrigley said over the weekend that ‘Friday was one of the toughest single days in recent times for GPs across England’ as they were ‘forced to return to pen and paper’.

He said: ‘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.’

According to Dr Wrigley, GPs were ‘pulling out all the stops’ over the weekend to deal with the aftermath of the ‘catastrophic loss of service’. 

He said that the ‘temporary loss of EMIS’ has caused a ‘considerable backlog’, and even when fixed, NHS England ‘should make clear to patients that normal service cannot be resumed immediately’.

Dr Wrigley added: ‘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.’

This morning, NHS England shared an update saying that ‘systems are now back online’ and patients with an appointment should continue to attend.

A spokesperson said: ‘Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff throughout this incident we are hoping to keep further disruption to a minimum, however there still may be some delays as services recover, particularly with GPs needing to rebook appointments, so please bear with us.’

Over the weekend, health secretary Wes Streeting said he continued to receive updates on the outage and thanked ‘all the GP surgery staff, pharmacists and other NHS workers who have worked tirelessly to continue to support and care for patients throughout’.