UK hospitals' SOS amid cyber attack: 'Unprecedented' blood shortage, please help

UK hospital cyber attack: The ransomware attack took place on Synnovis- a provider of testing services- on June 3.

UK hospitals are facing an unprecedented shortage of blood supplies owing to disruption from a cyber attack, health authorities said. The hospitals imposed limits on blood use and appealed for more donations. The ransomware attack took place on Synnovis- a provider of testing services- on June 3 and has resulted in large London hospitals run by Britain's state-funded National Health Service (NHS) facing disruptions. The attack also resulted in thousands of appointments for people to donate blood could not go ahead.

UK hospital cyber attack: Medical staff transfer a patient along a corridor at the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital in Blackburn, north-west England.(AFP)

The NHS said that that this is a “perfect storm” as the current period is that of high demand and there is difficulty in finding blood donors in the summer. It added that stocks of blood have dropped to "unprecedentedly low levels".

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

The SOS comes as there is 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. National stocks of all blood types is at 4.3 days as the NHS issued an "amber alert" to hospitals asking them to restrict the use of O type blood to essential cases and use substitutions in cases that it is safe to.

Earlier, a global IT outage affected the NHS's appointment and patient record system.