Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that patients are able to receive treatment in (a) hospitals and (b) primary care settings in the event of a cyber attack.

The Department is working with the National Cyber Security Centre, NHS England NHS Digital and NHS Improvement to prepare and rehearse incident response plans and take action to strengthen communications when core computer systems are affected by cyber security incidents.

A number of changes have been made that aim to make sure that the National Health Service and its systems are as resilient as possible, protecting patient data, ensuring safe patient care, and reducing the impact of cyber-attacks when they next occur.

To improve resilience in hospitals, £21 million of funding has been allocated to addressing key infrastructure vulnerabilities in major trauma centres and ambulance trusts to reduce the impact on patient access in the event of future cyber-attacks.