Operating on the NHS
The NHS gets a lot of bad press, with accusations of overspending, administrative inefficiences, and long waiting lists. Rather dramatically, the Red Cross of all people said the NHS was on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. People in countries which have experienced their own humanitarian crises might beg to differ.
On Friday 13th, Bart's Health, which runs six London hospitals and is the UK's largest health trust, had to shut down parts of its network to prevent the spread of a computer virus which had infected its systems. Originally this was being reported as a ransomware attack, but it later became clear that it was a previously-unseen virus. Bart's issued a statement saying no patient data had been affected although there was a backlog of requests for pathology results which had to be processed manually while the computerised system was offline.
The NHS is often a target for malware. In October 2016, three hospitals in Lincoln and Goole were seriously disrupted by a virus which resulted in cancellations of appointments and diagnostic procedures affecting about a thousand patients. Over the last year, at least 28 NHS trusts were victims of ransomware attempts although none of them paid up. There are also numerous reports of hackers targetting individual GP surgeries, healthcare centres, and other secondary care sites.
These attacks are, at best, a drain on NHS resources, and at worst they could endanger patients' lives. It is not just the cost of dealing with attacks when they happen, but also the cost of training staff how to use computers safely, the cost of antivirus software, spam filters, and firewalls, and the relentless cost of hardware upgrades because perfectly good older computers running older operating systems no longer receive patches from Microsoft to correct security defects in the Windows and Office code. All of that is time and money which could be better spent on healthcare.
Fact: The NHS with 1.7 million employees is the worlds fifth largest employer, behind the US Department of Defence (3.2m), the People's Liberation Army of China (2.3m), Walmart (2.1m) and McDonalds (1.9m).
26th January 2017
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.