Fears for patients as Crowdstrike chaos pharmacy backlogs set to continue

Misery persists for countless Brits today after a global IT glitch led to huge backlogs at pharmacies up and down the country

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Fears have been raised over a crisis in British pharmacies after the Crowdstrike IT glitch led to massive backlogs.

GP surgeries were forced to shutter their doors as flights were grounded and shops were left unable to take payments after the catastrophic bug caused a global computer meltdown. Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm, confirmed they were to blame due to an update file sent to Windows machines. By today, the issue had been fixed but it's expected to have devastating implications for days to come.

For today at least, the knock-on effects continue to cause chaos across the globe. Passengers looking to jet off for their summer holidays were met with more misery at airport terminals and some workers were unable to collect their due wages due to issues with payslip systems.

One of the worst-hit industries is Britain's pharmacies. Manchester-based pharamcist Thora explained how the backlogs will continue after yesterday's outage. She said that pharmacies in the city have been suffering due to "heightened tensions" from patients who are outraged they can't access their vital medicines.

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She told the BBC's Today programme: “What we know at the moment is obviously we have been experiencing some heightened tensions in some pharmacies by patients but also people have been really understanding and have been really patient with us

“This backlog will continue because obviously there will have been patients who have been unable to access their prescription because it will be hand-written at the surgery, and we’ll get a bit of a backlog, or they will eventually come through to us. But it’s a bit of a concern.”

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National Pharmacy Association Vice Chairman Olivier Picard told BBC Breakfast that it was causing "continuous problems" in pharmacies across the country.

He said: “I was in a pharmacy yesterday. In fact, I’m in a pharmacy this morning and we’ve had continuous problems. What we couldn’t do was download new prescriptions on July 19, but anything prior to that, that was downloaded on our computers, we were able to dispense.

“Most pharmacies will have an office based or computer-based system rather than online. That’s not all, but that’s the majority of pharmacies, so we were able to continue working with what we already had. What we couldn’t do is receive new prescriptions issued after the outage.”

His comments were echoed by a colleague, Nick Kaye, the chairman of the association. He warned that patients planning to collect prescriptions this weekend may be forced to wait due to the outage.

He said: "Systems are by and large back online and medicine deliveries have resumed in many community pharmacies today after the global IT outage. However, yesterday’s outage will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.

“We urge people to be patient when visiting their local pharmacy and some may be still prioritising those patients with emergency prescriptions from their GP surgery.”

Meanwhile, GPs have also been struggling with the IT outage. One told how "everything went down" in her surgery and predicted a worse situation "later on in the week".

Dr Fari Ahmad told BBC Breakfast: “Everything went down. There are supposed to be some business continuity things that are supposed to help, but we couldn’t access some of them. I know some places lost all their phone lines as well.

“People were struggling to get in. We were struggling to tell people what was going on. And if people did turn up, you had to see them without accessing their medical records. The doctors and the surgery went down to pen and paper.”

Dr Ahmad added: “We had people who were supposed to come in for results, and we couldn’t see them. We said: ‘Sorry, we can’t help you.’ We were just trying to deal with the emergencies on the day that really couldn’t wait.

“We couldn’t do our routine stuff, so the implications for us is a lot of that’s been bumped up. It’s all going to build up, so there’s going to be a lot more issues later on in the week.”