British hospitals are facing unprecedented blood shortages due to an ongoing cyber attack. Health authorities have introduced limits on the use of blood and called for its donation, Reuters reported today.
London’s major hospitals, run by the NHS, already faced disruption on June 3 due to an extortionist hacking attack on blood testing lab Synnovis. Among other things, the attack resulted in the inability to carry out thousands of planned blood draws from donors. In addition, last week a global computer systems outage affected the health records system.
The period of high demand for blood, combined with the added challenge of finding blood donors in the summer when people are on holiday and the warm weather leaves many too dehydrated to donate blood, helped create a “perfect storm”, the NHS said. “Blood supplies have dropped to an unprecedented low,” he added.
“We are urging more type 0 donors to come forward to help increase supplies for patients in need,” NHS chief Jo Farrar said. “The need for type 0 negative blood remains particularly critical,” she added.
In Britain, according to the NHS, group 0 blood stocks are only negative for about 1.6 days. It is a universal blood group that is used in emergency situations when the patient’s blood group is unknown. Nationwide reserves of blood of all groups are enough for 4.3 days.
The NHS has issued a so-called orange alert for hospitals, asking them to use type O blood only when absolutely necessary and to use substitutes where it is safe to do so.
Source: www.tyden.cz
