Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 1 December 2022 to Question 84943 on NHS Digital: Cybersecurity, what steps he has taken to ensure that a similar cyber incident does not occur again.

This incident was not targeted against the National Health Service but against Advanced, a third-party software supplier to the NHS. We have worked closely with Advanced to restore services. The majority of NHS services have now been reconnected and we are supporting the few NHS organisations still undergoing reconnecting. All but one of the affected mental health providers have now been reconnected and are in the restoration phase.

The incident has impacted data submission to the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). The MHSDS monthly publication has been reclassified as experimental statistics to reflect this. Caveats are included on the publication page to warn users when interpreting the data. The NHS Digital data liaison service and data quality teams are in regular communication with providers and continue to monitor the impact on submissions and reporting.