Patients urged to consider treatment options as cyber attack is ‘more challenging than Covid’
An Emergency Medicine consultant has appealed to people in North Tipperary to be mindful of all care options available to them following the recent cyber attack on the HSE.
Dr Gareth Quin, who is based at the Emergency Department at UHL, said the gravity of the attack runs even deeper than the Covid-19 crisis in that hospital management and staff had no time to prepare for the impact.
“This was - and still is - probably more challenging than Covid; we never thought we’d say that,” Dr Quin observed of the cyber attack. “Essentially, every IT system was shut down as a protective measure - all the administration systems, all of the laboratory systems, all of the radiology systems, all email, all of our telephones - our landlines run through the internet so they were all gone as well. So really, it was like flicking a switch - everything gone.”
He told of how those trying to maintain services at the Emergency Department have “had to go back to paper” in organising critical care for patients and their entire system has encountered huge delays. The attack has resulted in care teams unable to bring up patient records when a new case arrives at the Emergency Department, problems with tracking the patient’s subsequent care in the hospital, and difficulties in ordering and managing X-rays.
The HSE has asked people to think about the treatment options available should they need medical attention and to consider local GPs as well as the Local Injury Unit at Nenagh hospital.
“The Injury Units are similarly hampered but, equally, they are functioning; they are still open for business,” Dr Quin said, adding that while some patients are needlessly travelling to Limerick with minor injuries, the LIU in Nenagh is well used.
“They’re generally looked after more quickly,” he said of patients visiting the unit. “The staff we have there are very experienced in what they do. We have a lot of nurse practitioners there who are experts in minor injuries. So they work very well.”
Dr Quin stressed that Limerick ED is open for “genuine emergency” attendance. “That's things like acute chest pains, if you think you’re having a heart attack, stroke, or serious injury.
“But there are a lot of conditions that patients could maybe attend their GP for in the first instance, and the GP might be able to treat them from start to finish in their surgery. GPs have other options - for example GPs can access our Medical Assessment Units, which are in Nenagh and St John’s and Ennis.”
While there have been some encouraging signs, Dr Quin made the point that recovery from the cyber attack would be gradual and could take several weeks yet. He said patients coming to hospital can help by bringing existing documentation - such as a discharge letter or a hospital-issued prescription - because care teams are still prevented from accessing chart numbers. “Managing patients is taking a lot longer than it normally would and that is why we are trying to reduce demand to some extent so that the patients we were seeing, the ones we really needed to be seeing, that we could manage them as efficiently as possible,” Dr Quin said.