HSE cyberattack: Laboratory facilities remain ‘very compromised’

The HSE has said systems for hospitals’ radiotherapy and laboratory facilities remain “very compromised” almost two weeks after a damaging cyberattack.

Anne O’Connor, the HSE’s chief operations officer, said on Wednesday that 13 days after the cyberattack some progress had been made, but it was site specific with a major reduction in services in hospitals in the west and the south of the country.

The HSE was forced to shut down all of its IT systems earlier this month following a significant ransomware attack, which focused on accessing data stored on central servers.

Government sources said on Tuesday night there was still no evidence that stolen data on patients and staff had been published on the internet, despite a warning by the criminal gang behind the attack that this would happen on Monday.

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Voluntary hospitals were resuming services, but laboratories were operating under 20 per cent capacity and a lot of samples sent by GPs were just not being tested. "That's a concern for us," she told RTÉ radio's Morning Ireland.

Ms O’Connor said the problem for outpatients was the lack of access to previous records. If a patient presented today they were going to be treated as a new patient as there was no access to their previous treatments or medications, she said.

The large voluntary hospitals in Dublin had resumed outpatient treatment, but only 40 per cent of outpatients nationally would be seen this week.

Normally, the HSE would treat 14,000 outpatients per day. In terms of inpatients, only 50 per cent were being admitted, Ms O’Connor said, those who most needed to be admitted.

“We are bringing people in on the basis of urgency,” she added.

Ms O’Connor said the health service was continuing to function but it was operating in a different way.

The main concern was cancer services which had resumed in St Luke's Hospital in Dublin and at its branches in St James's and Blanchardstown hospitals.

Cancer care sites in Galway and Cork had not yet reopened and people from Galway were having to travel to Dublin for treatment, which was not ideal, she said.

She said email access on 80,000 devices had been restored but it was “a bit away” from connecting them to servers.

This was hugely important as email access was vital for clinicians, she said.

When asked about the reporting of the rollout of the vaccine programme, Ms O’Connor explained that the system for communicating such figures from GPs was not operating at present, but that the actual operation of the vaccine programme had not been impacted by the cyberattack.

The priority for the HSE continued to be to get radiotherapy and laboratory facilities back up and running and to provide critical patient care, she said.

The HSE has said emergency departments are still open for all medical emergencies but are “very busy” because of the IT outage.

It has warned the public to expect “significant delays” and to only attend if you need urgent care.

Most hospital appointments will go ahead as planned but many X-ray appointments are cancelled, it said.

Most community health services such as disability, mental health, primary care and older people’s services are operating as normal.

Covid-19 vaccinations and tests are going ahead though there may be some delays in getting test results.