Southport & Ormskirk Hospitals NHS Trust issued the following statement on Tuesday 16 May 2017 about progress towards resuming normal services following the recent NHS cyber attack.

Therese Patten, Chief Operating Officer, said: “The Trust took swift action to shutdown and protect our many clinical systems when the threat emerged on Friday. This included pharmacy, x-ray and imaging, clinical tests and digitally-held patient records.

“We began successfully restoring critical clinical systems on Monday evening and many more are coming back online today.

“The volume of planned services was reduced on Monday and Tuesday to ensure we continued to run a safe service.

“We plan to begin returning services to normal from Wednesday. There is more up to date information on our website, www.southportandormskirk.nhs.uk.

“Both our hospitals continue to be open for emergency care. Please only use A&E if your need is urgent so we can focus resources on the sickest patients.

“I want to reassure patients and the public that all patient information is safe and will be available to us as systems are brought back online.

“I also want to thank our staff for maintaining a safe service for patients over a challenging past few days and, in particular, our IT colleagues for working night and day to get systems back online with the support of colleagues from across the region.

“We are also supporting the criminal investigation into the attack on the NHS and have supplied affected computer equipment to the police.”

Visit the Southport & Ormskirk Hospital website for the latest information about services at the trust.