Britain’s National Health Service says global IT outage affecting some systems

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) said a global IT outage was affecting its appointment and patient record system but that it hadn’t seen any impact on critical emergency services.

“The NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, which is causing disruption in the majority of GP practices,” a spokesperson for the NHS 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.”

(Reporting by Sarah Young, writing by Sachin Ravikumar, editing by Alistair Smout)