NHS Digital and the 111 service will be the organisations who suffer through this. In reality, patients should be safe as most patient records are backed up - hospitals can get patient records through a number of mechanisms and GPs and HCs will/should have plans in place or have some way of getting patient meds to patients. Most hospitals still have paper-based records within their grounds or on an external location, which could easily be faxed or relayed over the phone.
The thing is, is that, most trusts will just shut up shop on their systems until NHS Digital give them the all clear.
I know that it is utterly despicable, but what will be more despicable will be the knock-on bellends using this to further their interests. Individual trusts will use this to levy more money from central government, which is fine and all, but with some certain trusts having pretty much total control over their own budgets, they could simply employ nearly any company they wish to update their systems.
Safe to say, there will be small-scale computer security companies rubbing their hands together at this moment in time in the prospect of getting a slice.
We'll see I guess... but it is looking as though there may have been the odd numpty who has logged into their personal e-mail on a trust terminal and downloaded this exploit thinking that it was legit - most trusts have a spam filter for their in-house emailing system... Whether this exploit got around that is another matter, but they're usually quite good at seeing spam patterns across the board.
