Health Secretary Wes Streeting has urged people to “bear with” GPs amid a major IT outage that has caused “considerable disruption” to appointment bookings and other services.
Thousands of GP practices have been affected, with NHS England confirming there has been an issue with the EMIS Web system, which is understood to be used by about 60% of practices in England.
There have also been issues with administrative systems in some hospitals while some ambulance services have reported a surge in demand.
Pharmacies have also been affected, with the National Pharmacy Association warning that disruption is likely to continue through the weekend, even when systems are back online, as outlets deal with a backlog of medicine deliveries.
The PA news agency understands that around 3,700 GP practices may be affected. People trying to access the NHS app have also encountered problems.
In a post on X, Mr Streeting wrote: “This is having a particular impact on GP appointments and electronic prescribing.
“Please bear with your local GPs if they’re grappling with this on top of normal pressures.”
A spokesperson for NHS England said: “The NHS has long-standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP.
“There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would.
“There are also some issues with administrative systems in hospitals that mean staff are having to work manually from paper to manage certain tasks but in the majority of hospitals, care is continuing as normal.
“Patients should attend appointments unless told otherwise. Only contact your GP if it’s urgent, and otherwise please use 111 online or call 111.”
GP surgeries reported issues with accessing patient records or booking appointments because of the outage.
Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs, said: “Our members are telling us that today’s outage is causing considerable disruption to GP practice bookings and IT systems – practices using EMIS IT systems appear to be particularly affected.
“Outages like this affect our access to important clinical information about our patients, as well as our ability to book tests, make referrals, and inform the most appropriate treatment plan.”
She asked patients to “try and wait” until the outage is resolved if their issue is not urgent.
EMIS Web is the most widely used clinical system for primary care in the UK.
It enables GP practices to book appointments, examine records and includes a clinical decision support tool as well as helping with admin.
Following the outage, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident due to disruption to its radiotherapy services.
It contacted patients who were due to have treatment on Friday morning to reschedule.
A statement on its website said the hospital is “now able to deliver radiotherapy services and this afternoon’s appointments will take place as scheduled”.
However, it warned the disruption could affect appointments into next week.
A spokesperson for Salisbury District Hospital, which has also been affected, told PA: “The challenge is around our patient administration system. It means that we’ve gone to manual registration of new patients.
“This is in the emergency, maternity and other front door services where people present directly at the hospital. That process is now slow rather than being digital.”
They said the IT issues have not impacted outpatients, with appointments running as normal, and that while they are not seeing any staff shortages at the moment they are using paper systems to allocate cover.
In another post on X, formerly Twitter, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust said the outage “has affected some of our systems which is impacting some clinical services”.
West Herts Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which includes Watford General, Hemel Hempstead & St Albans City Hospitals, said the impact on their services has been “minor”.
A string of ambulance services reported seeing increased demand on their 999 and NHS 111 services, including London Ambulance Service (LAS), South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS), South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) and North East Ambulance Service (NEAS).
LAS received a third more calls by 2pm on Friday than it would usually receive in a 24-hour period, according to its chief executive.
Daniel Elkeles said: “Following the global IT outage that has impacted some NHS services across the capital, our call handlers and ambulance crews are incredibly busy with huge increases in the number of calls to both our 999 and 111 services.
“In fact, by 2pm today, we had received more than 3,000 999 calls and 3,000 calls to our 111 services – this is a third higher than we would usually receive in a full 24 hour period.”
SECAmb made clear the majority of its infrastructure is unaffected but that it does not have access to some external NHS services and has declared a “business continuity incident”.
Pharmacies reported issues with accessing prescriptions from GP surgeries and said this would affect the delivery of medicines to patients.
Patients with “minor ailments” are also being sent to pharmacies from GP surgeries, according to the Independent Pharmacies Association.