Patient death at London hospital linked to cyber attack on NHS The Independent

pNotifications can be managed in browser preferencesppPlease refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged inppGuys and St Thomas Kings College and Lewisham and Greenwich hospitals were all affected by the cyber attack in June last yearppFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing Whether its investigating the financials of Elon Musks proTrump PAC or producing our latest documentary The A Word which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messagingppAt such a critical moment in US history we need reporters on the ground Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the storyppThe Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum And unlike many other quality news outlets we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone paid for by those who can afford itppThe death of a patient has been linked to a cyberattack on the NHS last year ppCyber criminals attacked two major NHS trusts causing more than 1000 cancer treatment delays 2000 outpatient appointments to be cancelled and more than 1000 operations postponed ppKings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said on Wednesday a patient died during the cyber attack as a result of a long wait time for blood test results ppOne patient sadly died unexpectedly during the cyberattack As is standard practice when this happens we undertook a detailed review of their care the trust said in a statementppThe patient safety incident investigation identified a number of contributing factors that led to the patients death ppThis included a long wait for a blood test result due to the cyberattack impacting pathology services at the time ppWe have met with the patients family and shared the findings of the safety investigation with them ppSynnovis which offers a range of pathology services including diagnostics testing and digital pathology in southeast London was the victim of the ransomware attack understood to be carried out by the Russian group Qilin ppGuys and St Thomas Kings College and Lewisham and Greenwich hospitals were all affected by the attack on June 3 last year Primary care across six boroughs and two mental health trusts were also impacted ppWithout this pathology service the NHS Trusts in the area were unable to do work involving transfusions or blood matching Instead they had to use Otype blood for everyone the universal blood type ppHowever this then resulted in a national shortage of Otype blood supplies NHS England explained ppSynnovis also revealed it had to cancel testing for 20000 blood samples across 135000 patients received as it could not test them so samples degraded As a result the samples were destroyed and patients had to rebook tests ppSensitive data stolen from an NHS provider in the cyberattack was also allegedly published online ppAccording to the BBC the cyber criminal group shared almost 400GB of data including patient names dates of birth NHS numbers and descriptions of blood tests on its darknet site and Telegram channel ppSpreadsheets containing financial arrangements between hospitals and GP services and Synnovis were also published ppJoin thoughtprovoking conversations follow other Independent readers and see their repliesppPlease refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged inp