The Microsoft outage could keep some patients in hospital longer and leave others running low on medication, the chair of the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has warned, as pharmacies struggle to work without access to NHS email systems.
Olivier Picard, who chairs the NPA and represents 6,000 members, said the tech disruption that began on Thursday evening has forced pharmacists to "work around the system." Pharmacies have been unable to access their NHS emails, meaning they could not contact hospitals or GPs for information on patients.
Pharmacy contingency plans in action
Mr Picard, a Berkshire-based pharmacist, revealed that some chemists have been forced to revert to contingency plans, with staff driving to hospitals to collect paper prescriptions and prepare medication to take back for patients.
He told the Mirror that dispensing or receiving prescriptions was not impacted, as this is not done through an NHS email. However, problems have arisen in local surgeries where patients are sometimes only allowed to request repeat prescriptions through the NHS App or via NHS email for security reasons.
Mr Picard said: "Some patients are telling me, 'Well, I'm running out of medication over the weekend.' There could be an argument around when it is reasonable to ask for a repeat prescription, but at the same time, these patients could be in a position where they have to wait for their repeat until next week."
Hospital discharge delays feared
The NPA chair added that some pharmacies, including his own, offer a service to hospitals where they can request medication to allow patients to be discharged. He said: "Now, if we can't receive the email, we can't prepare the medication. If we don't prepare the medication, the patient is staying in hospital until they receive the medication, and that can have a ripple effect for patients who might have to stay in hospital until we are able to receive and prepare those packs for them."
On being forced to revert to driving between a hospital and pharmacy with papers and medication, Mr Picard said: "Basically today... we've gone back 20 years just because of that, in the way we work."
Mr Picard shared concerns over tech disruptions, noting this was not the first pharmacists have had to face, and highlighted the extra concern for community pharmacies entering the festive period, which is the busiest time of the year for chemists. He said: "Pharmacies have gone through wars and pandemics over the last two centuries and have been able to continue providing NHS care to their patients. But we can't be let down by a system."
NHS and wider impact
In a statement earlier today, the NPA said: "Please bear with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays to some prescriptions."
NHS England said health service staff were "enacting long-standing measures" to overcome IT outages, including using paper records, but asked patients to continue contacting services such as 999 and 111 as necessary, and attend appointments as usual.
Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown, President of the Royal College of GPs, said practices were continuing to provide care despite the disruptions. She said: "We understand that the disruption is primarily affecting email communications, although there have also been reports of difficulties accessing some online consultation systems. The full extent of the impact is still being established."
Other key services in the UK impacted by the tech disruption included some police forces, schools, and councils. Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night.
Millions of customers have been unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams also affected for many, and the tech giant's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted. Other AI chat services have also been disrupted, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
