Niamh Griffin reports:
Two months on from the cyberattack on the HSE and the consequences for patients are only starting to emerge, health professionals have warned.
Vice-president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association, Professor Rob Landers, said the IHCA has specific concerns around delayed cancer diagnoses.
“If there is a high suspicion that a patient has a cancer, that is always treated as urgent and it will go through,” he said.
[…]
“The cyberattack completely crippled the laboratory and radiology systems,” he said. “We effectively could only do about 5% of normal activity for a good three to four weeks.”
[…]
It is now believed about 10,000 patients missed out on appointments following the May 14 IT attack, including thousands of virtual appointments, she said.
Read more on Irish Examiner.
This has always been the risk/concern about ransomware attacks on health systems — that care would be interrupted, and lives potentially lost.
As a reminder, this attack was attributed to Conti threat actors, who are linked to Russia. You can probably read my thoughts about now.