NHS Blood and Transplant warns of severe blood shortage following a ransomware attack

NHS Blood and Transplant has issued an “amber alert” asking hospitals to restrict the use of O type blood following a major cyber incident that impacted blood collection at London hospitals.

 

The development follows the London-based pathology services provider announcing that it was a victim of a ransomware attack on June 3 that affected all of its IT systems.

 

The ransomware attack affected several NHS hospitals, including Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and other primary care providers across southeast London.

 

In a recent announcement, NHS Blood and Transplant asked hospitals in and around the London area to restrict the use of O type blood.

 

“A perfect storm of increased demand of O type blood from hospitals following the recent cyber attack which has impacted London hospitals and reduced collections due to high levels of unfilled appointments at donor centres in town and city centres, has caused stocks of blood to drop to unprecedentedly low levels.

 

“NHS Blood and Transplant has written to hospitals today to issue an “Amber Alert” asking them to restrict the use of O type blood to essential cases and use substitutions where clinically safe to do so,” reads the announcement.

 

NHSBT has urged O negative and O positive donors to urgently book slots at donor centres to donate blood.

“Today, national stocks of O Negative are 1.6 days and overall national stocks of blood across all types is 4.3 days. On average, there are around 50,000 appointments to fill each week. There are over 12,000 appointments still to fill in donor centres over the next two weeks,” NHSBT added.

 

Ciaran Martin, the former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre, revealed that the Qilin ransomware group was behind the cyber attack on Synnovis.

 

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Martin said, “We believe it is a Russian group of cyber criminals who call themselves Qilin. They’re simply looking for money. It’s unlikely they would have known that they would have caused such serious primary healthcare disruption when they set out to attack the company,” he said.