London hospitals face blood shortage after Synnovis ransomware attack

England's NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) has issued an urgent call to O Positive and O Negative blood donors to book appointments and donate after last week’s cyberattack on pathology provider Synnovis impacted multiple hospitals in London.

On June 4, operations at multiple large NHS hospitals in London were disrupted by the ransomware attack that the Russian cybercrime group Qilin (a.k.a. Agenda) launched on Synnovis.

The incident impacted blood transfusions, with many non-urgent procedures being canceled or redirected.

Blood reserves running low

An announcement from the NHS today explains that affected hospitals cannot quickly match blood donor and recipient types, so there’s a risk of transfusion mismatch that could lead to life-threatening complications.

To address this risk, and until blood type matching systems are working again, the doctors at the impacted hospitals have opted to grant O Negative and O Positive types to patients who cannot afford to wait multiple hours for alternative blood type determination methods.

O Negative blood types can be transfused safely to all patients, while O Positive can donate to anyone with positive blood type rhesus, roughly three out of four patients.

Unfortunately, this safety-assuring tactic has caused the reserves of the two particular blood types to run low.

“The IT incident affecting a pathology provider means the affected hospitals cannot currently match patients’ blood at the same frequency as usual,” explains NHSBT.

“For surgeries and procedures requiring blood to take place, hospitals need to use O type blood as this is safe to use for all patients and blood has a shelf life of 35 days, so stocks need to be continually replenished,” the agency says,

“That means more units of these types of blood than usual will be required over the coming weeks to support the wider efforts of frontline staff to keep services running safely for local patients.”

Synnovis has not released any updates since June 4 as recovery efforts are ongoing, with no estimation on when impacted systems will return to normal operations.