The death of a patient has been linked to a cyber-attack on the NHS last year.
Cyber criminals attacked two major NHS trusts causing more than 1,000 cancer treatment delays, 2,000 outpatient appointments to be cancelled and more than 1,000 operations postponed.
King’s 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.
“One patient sadly died unexpectedly during the cyber-attack. As is standard practice when this happens, we undertook a detailed review of their care,” the trust said in a statement.
“The patient safety incident investigation identified a number of contributing factors that led to the patient’s death.
“This included a long wait for a blood test result due to the cyber-attack impacting pathology services at the time.
“We have met with the patient’s family, and shared the findings of the safety investigation with them.”
Synnovis, 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.
Guy's and St Thomas', King's 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.
Without this pathology service the NHS Trusts in the area were unable to do work involving transfusions or blood matching. Instead, they had to use O-type blood for everyone – the universal blood type.
However, this then resulted in a national shortage of O-type blood supplies, NHS England explained.
Synnovis also revealed it had to cancel testing for 20,000 blood samples across 13,5000 patients received as it could not test them, so samples “degraded”. As a result, the samples were destroyed, and patients had to rebook tests.
Sensitive data stolen from an NHS provider in the cyber-attack was also allegedly published online.
According 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.
Spreadsheets containing financial arrangements between hospitals and GP services and Synnovis were also published.
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