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Virus forces hospitals to shut computer systems down

Wednesday 19th of November 2008

A number of London hospitals have been forced to shut down their entire computer systems after they were struck by a virus.

St Bartholomew's, the Royal London Hospital and the London Chest Hospital - which are all run by Barts and London NHS Trust - had to take the action yesterday after PCs become infected with malware.

After the problems were detected at midday yesterday (November 18th), ambulances that would normally travel to the medical centres were diverted to hospitals with working systems rather than medical staff having to revert to a paper-based admissions system.

According to a PC World report, the computers were still down this morning but the centres had begun taking emergency patients again.

Meanwhile, NHS spokesman William Mach spoke out to say that no patient data was at risk of disclosure.

He added: "We've got a team in place that is desperately trying to restore full power to everyone.

"They are preoccupied with trying to get the systems online."

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