Cyber attack damage can be more public, says NHSE boss

The NHS’s head of cyber security has said the service can be more transparent about attacks that affect the service.

NHS England director of national cyber security operations Mike Fell told a conference last week that NHS cyber security teams felt they were in an “echo chamber” and that the issue was not taken seriously enough by clinicians.

Speaking at the Healthcare Excellence Through Technology event last week, Mr Fell said he was surprised by the lack of buy-in to the issue from clinicians.

He said the risk posed to patient safety should be “a really easy sell to professionals who have taken the Hippocratic oath”, and that specialist cyber teams had “hard questions to ask ourselves” about why this hadn’t happened.

Last year, a patient at King’s College Hospital died after a cyber attack on the trust’s pathology provider Synnovis meant their blood test results were slow to be processed. Hospital trusts in the North West reported a £3m cost after an attack in 2024 and a medical devices company supplying half of England’s local authorities tipped into insolvency after a cyber attack. A Scottish health board also had its data compromised last year.

Mr Fell added: “We don’t have enough ownership of doctors and business owners seeing it as part of their world.”

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Source: HSJ, 13 October 2025