New Cyber Strategy for the NHS

In March, the government set out a new strategy to protect the NHS from cyber attacks. HB looks at what it involves

The government has announced that it will provide a plan to promote cyber resilience across the health and care sectors by 2030 and protect services and patients.

The plan aims to ensure that services are better protected from cyber threats, further securing sensitive information and ensuring patients can continue accessing care safely as the NHS continues to cut waiting lists.

The aim is for all health and social care organisations to achieve cyber resilience no later than 2030.

Through good cyber security, it is hoped that organisations are better able to manage their cyber risk; organisations are better able to protect their patient, service user and staff data: organisations can more quickly respond to and recover from a cyber attack; and people’s trust in the digital systems is increased, so technological innovations can be applied with confidence.

In a foreword to the strategy, Phil Huggins, national chief information security officer and Mike Fell, executive director of national cyber operations said: “In an increasingly digitised health and social care service, patients and service users remain at the core of our vital work helping create a cyber resilient health and social care sector to 2030. While every health and social care organisation must take responsibility for its own cyber security, with national cyber security teams setting direction and providing central support, we must work as one across the system to further cyber resilience to improve the safety of the people we care for.

“Although our cyber defences have improved over the past years and especially since WannaCry in 2017, we know we still have further to go. The 5 pillars in our strategy focus our approach on the most important risks to our most critical systems, while growing our cyber workforce so that we can better tackle threats in the long term.”

The strategy acknowledges that healthcare is more digital than ever before. Over 40 million people now have an NHS login and over 50 per cent of social care providers now use a digital social care record.

According to the Department of Health and Social Care, progress has been made in recent years, and the sector is now much better protected than it was at the time of the WannaCry cyber attack in 2017. E