The National Pharmacy Association has today (July 19) called on patients to be calm with pharmacy staff as a global Microsoft IT outage causes disruption across the NHS as well as airports, trains, banks and media outlets.

The outage has left GP surgeries unable to access patient records and book appointments and pharmacies have struggled to access prescriptions, which is hampering their ability to supply medicines to patients.

The outage has been linked to cyber security firm Crowdstrike but is not being treated by the Government as a cyber-attack from hostile states or criminals, although prime minister Keir Starmer called a COBRA meeting this morning to discuss the issue.

The NPA urged patients not to take their frustrations out on pharmacy staff and insisted it was “urgently raising this issue with the NHS England”. The statement was quickly picked up by national media outlets on their live news feeds.

An NPA spokesperson said: “We're aware that due to global IT outages that services in some community pharmacies, including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries, are disrupted today. We urge patients to be patient whilst visiting their pharmacy.”

GP practices using the EMIS Web computer system were this morning unable to access the platform, according to an update from the system supplier. EMIS ProScript also told pharmacies it will provide more updates as it attempts to fix the problem.

Community Pharmacy England told pharmacies experiencing IT issues to "use the normal reporting routes" and start by contacting their IT supplier. CPE said information on the "escalation process" for IT issues can be found in its factsheet.

CPE said if an IT system supplier cannot resolve an issue, they should "escalate" it to the NHS National Service Desk, give the pharmacy a progress report and provide them with the NSD national incident number.

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