UK hospitals face blood shortages after cyber attack

British hospitals are facing an unprecedented shortage of blood supplies due to an ongoing cyber attack, health authorities said on Thursday (25), imposing limits on blood use and appealing for more donations.

Major London hospitals run by Britain’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) have faced disruption since the June 3 ransomware attack on Synnovis, a testing services provider.

The attack also meant that thousands of blood donation appointments could not be made.

A period of high demand, combined with the added challenge of finding blood donors during the summer when people are on holiday and the hotter weather can leave people too dehydrated to give blood, helped create the “perfect storm”, the NHS said.

Blood supplies have fallen to “unprecedented levels,” he added.

“We urgently need more group O donors to come forward and help increase supplies to treat patients who require treatment,” the chief executive of the NHS blood and transplant arm, Jo Farrar, said in a statement. “The need for O negative blood in particular remains critical.”

There is only about 1.6 days’ supply of O negative blood – the universal type used in emergencies when a patient’s blood type is unknown – left across the country, the NHS said. Overall national stocks of all blood types are 4.3 days.

The NHS has issued an “amber alert” to hospitals, asking them to restrict the use of type O blood to essential cases and use replacements where it is safe to do so.

Since the cyber incident began, affected hospitals in London have needed an additional 1.7 days of O-negative blood – nearly double the amount compared to the same period a year earlier. The blood has a shelf life of 35 days.

Last week, a global IT outage affected the NHS patient appointments and records system.