UK hospitals face ‘unprecedented’ blood shortage after cyber attack

British hospitals are facing an unprecedented shortage of blood supplies due to disruption from an ongoing cyber attack, health authorities said on Thursday, as they imposed limits on blood use and appealed for more donations.

Large London hospitals run by Britain’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) have faced disruption since the June 3 ransomware attack on Synnovis, a provider of testing services.

The attack also meant thousands of appointments for people to donate blood could not go ahead.

A period of high demand, combined with the added challenge of finding blood donors over the summer, when people are away on holiday and warmer weather can leave people too dehydrated to give blood, had helped created the “perfect storm”, the NHS said.

Stocks of blood have dropped to “unprecedentedly low levels”, it added.

“We urgently need more O group donors to come forward and help boost stocks to treat patients needing treatment,” NHS Blood and Transplant Chief Executive Jo Farrar said in a statement. “The need for O negative blood in particular remains critical.”

Only about 1.6 days’ worth of O negative blood – the universal type used in emergencies when a patient’s blood type is unknown – are left nationally, the NHS said. Overall national stocks of all blood types is at 4.3 days.

The NHS has issued an “amber alert” to hospitals, asking them to restrict the use of O type blood to essential cases and use substitutions where it is safe to do so.

Since the start of the cyber incident, affected hospitals in London have needed an additional 1.7 days worth of O negative blood – almost double the amount compared with the same period a year earlier. Blood has a shelf life of 35 days.

Last week, a global IT outage affected the NHS’s appointment and patient record system.