Speaking about the repercussions of Friday’s global IT outage on primary care, Dr Frances O’Hagan, chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland general practitioners committee, said: 
 
“Tomorrow will be a particularly busy day for our GP surgeries as we deal with the aftermath of this outage. A key online system we rely upon to access and update patients’ clinical records went down, causing a considerable backlog of work that will now have to dealt with in this coming week. This will of course put considerable strain on general practice, however, staff will continue to provide care to the best of their ability. Whilst these systems return online, I would appeal to anyone accessing their GP to be patient while staff do their upmost to address this backlog of work.

“To ensure such an outage does not have a similar impact in the future, one that forced many surgeries to return to pen and paper to be able to serve their patients, we would call for more investment from the Department of Health in contingency planning and recovery plans.”