The new health secretary yesterday (July 22) thanked pharmacists for dealing with the global IT outages that have caused mayhem since Friday for the sector, including access to prescriptions and medicine deliveries.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Wes Streeting extended “huge thanks to GPs, pharmacists and NHS staff who’ve soldiered on through the challenge”.
Read more: ‘We’re bracing ourselves’: Pharmacies ‘still’ backlogged after IT failure
“Bear with them as they get back on top of things this week”, he urged.
On Friday, pharmacies using EMIS ProScript electronic prescription service (EPS) system experienced issues after the tech was affected by an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
“Back online”
The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) yesterday told C+D that community pharmacies across the UK are “still working though backlogs” caused by the IT outages.
NPA chair Nick Kaye added that pharmacies “may still be prioritising emergency prescriptions from their local GP surgeries as well as experiencing increased demand”.
Some pharmacists were faced with GPs resorting to writing paper prescriptions while others - like Newdays Pharmacy group owner Olivier Picard - received “no prescriptions” at all on Friday or Saturday, he told C+D.
Read more: Pharmacies face return of paper prescriptions amid 'global IT outages'
Pharmacist and co-owner of Imaan Healthcare Mark Bartley said that “if there is a big massive backlog to still come through, certainly by the end of the week we should be back up to normal”.
And Community Pharmacy England (CPE) yesterday morning added that NHS England (NHSE) and EMIS had advised affected users that systems were “back online” and that the IT provider was “working to confirm that everything is working as expected”.