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Community pharmacies have been unable to access GP prescriptions or carry out medicine deliveries, owing to an IT outage that has affected computers across the world, the National Pharmacy Association has said.
In a statement published on 19 July 2024, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said the outage has been linked to a “a defect found in a single content update”, impacting PCs, servers and other IT running Microsoft Windows at companies worldwide.
As a result, a spokesperson from the NPA said: “Services in some community pharmacies, including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries, are disrupted today.
“We urge patients to be patient whilst visiting their pharmacy. We’re urgently raising this issue with the NHS England.”
Raj Matharu, chief executive of Community Pharmacy South East London, said the outage was “making it very difficult” for pharmacy teams.
“The chatter from my WhatsApp groups is that EMIS [Egton Medical Information Systems, which supplies electronic patient record systems and software used across the UK] is being affected mostly and this is the case in my pharmacy.
“The [electronic prescribing system] functionality is not working and making it very difficult for GP and community pharmacy teams.”
EMIS, which operates in 41% of the UK’s pharmacies and 58% of GP surgeries, enables GPs to book appointments and access patient notes, and also allows pharmacies to access GP prescriptions.
Mubasher Ali, chief executive at Community Pharmacy Lancashire and South Cumbria, said: “All our GP surgery sites are currently down on EMIS.
“We are liaising with all relevant external stakeholders to ensure we keep patient continuity going across our pharmacies. We are also working closely with [North West Ambulance Service], the NHS 111 providers, and we are trying to streamline as best as we can.”
He added that pharmacies were “trying to mitigate the secondary care impact” of the outage through Pharmacy First and directing people from NHS 111 to community pharmacies “for urgent supply of meds and minor illness conditions”.
Yogendra Parmar, chief officer of City and Hackney Local Pharmaceutical Committee, said that he was “overhearing that there’s a general problem of generation of EPS prescriptions” and that “wholesaler portals are down”.
There had been a “massive impact” on general practice, with practices unable to refer to Pharmacy First, and that prescriptions were having to be handwritten, which was “causing delays”, he added.
Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Independent Pharmacy Association, added: “The EMIS system has been affected, which also operates PharmOutcomes.
“Also there are delays in ordering medicines from wholesalers as the system is down.
“In community pharmacy we regularly see IT system failures that are outside of control, but recently this has increased, and on top of all the current challenges in community pharmacy, this is yet another stress that has been added to their daily work.”
Alastair Buxton, director of NHS services at Community Pharmacy England, said the outage also affected “some users of the community pharmacy EMIS ProScript EPS system”.
“Where a pharmacy IT system is unavailable, the pharmacy owner will activate relevant parts of their business continuity plan, but it will inevitably result in delays to them being able to access and dispense prescriptions from the NHS EPS.”
A spokesperson for NHS England said: “The NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, which is causing disruption in the majority of GP practices.”
They added that the NHS “has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions” as well as the usual phone systems for people to contact their GPs”.
The statement from CrowdStrike said that the underlying issue “has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed”.
“This is not a security incident or cyber attack,” it added.
