NHS London weekly update reports over 7,000 outpatient appointments postponed since attack

NHS England London published its weekly update on the clinical impact of the ransomware attack on pathology services provider Synnovis on Friday 19 July, covering the week ending 14 July. In that week, 1,028 hospital outpatient appointments and 71 elective procedures were rescheduled at King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, alongside 24 community outpatient appointments¹.

The cumulative totals since the attack on Monday 3 June now stand at more than 7,000 outpatient appointments and over 1,500 elective procedures postponed across the two trusts¹. Of the 71 elective procedures postponed in the latest week, two were cancer treatments, compared with five the previous week. The update states it is too early to understand the impact on 62-day performance or the faster diagnosis standard for the affected trusts¹.

South east London pathology services provided this week remained at around 54% of normal capacity. No planned caesarean sections have been postponed or rescheduled in the last two weeks. Primary care appointments are going ahead as normal, but blood tests are being prioritised for urgent cases, and GP referrals are significantly affected, with only urgent referrals accepted for blood sciences; normal services are operating for histology and cervical smears¹.

Guy's and St Thomas' has restarted outpatient blood tests and is contacting patients to book appointments in order of clinical priority as capacity increases. Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts remain in a critical incident, while Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Bromley Healthcare and primary care services in south east London continue to be significantly impacted¹.

Dr Chris Streather, Medical Director for NHS London, said:

NHS Blood and Transplant are calling on O Positive and O Negative donors to urgently book appointments at one of the 25 town and city centre NHS Blood Donor Centres in England. Its director of donor experience, Mark Chambers, said the service is experiencing higher than usual pressures on maintaining stocks of O Negative, the universal blood type, citing the cyber incident and variable weather conditions affecting sickle cell patients¹.

Why it matters for households

The disruption is concentrated in south east London. Patients at Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley remain under a critical incident, and services at Oxleas, Lewisham and Greenwich, Bromley Healthcare and local primary care are still significantly affected¹. NHS England London advises people to access services in the normal way, dialling 999 in an emergency, to use NHS 111 through the NHS App, online or by phone for non-urgent care, and to attend booked appointments unless contacted to say otherwise¹. A helpline has been set up for people affected: 0345 8778967¹. Blood donors can book at blood.co.uk or on 0300 123 23 23¹. Our guide to NHS appointments, A&E and tests during an IT outage sets out how NHS services are affected in an outage, and the Synnovis ransomware incident page covers this attack in detail; the cyber-attacks hub covers the wider subject.

NHS England London notes that all numbers quoted are drawn from unvalidated management information, provided in the interests of transparency¹.

What happens next

NHS England London says updates will be provided on a weekly basis as the incident continues, and that the NHS will continue to provide updates as more detail becomes available through Synnovis' full investigation¹.