The government’s flagship health plan cannot be achieved without cyber security, a senior NHS official has warned.
NHS England’s director of national cyber operations Mike Fell told delegates that achieving the shift from analogue to digital ‘cannot be done without cyber resilience’.
Mr Fell, who will be moving on to become chief security officer at the Department for Work and Pensions later in the year, stressed the move from analogue to digital was essential for making the NHS ‘sustainable’.
Speaking at the Digital Health Rewired conference in Birmingham on Tuesday, he highlighted that ‘cyber’ had not been included in the government’s 10-Year Health Plan.
He added: ‘So, undoubtedly, the absence of cyber from the [10-Year Health] plan as a word, makes it more challenging.
‘The 10-Year Plan is very clear about one of the three priorities being moving from analogue to digital. That cannot be done without cyber resilience.
‘The ability to go from analogue to digital is a really important one to make the NHS sustainable.’
Mr Fell also told the conference session that it was essential for NHS systems to be able to go from analogue to digital and back again to respond to incidents.
‘The ability to flex back from digital to analogue and then back to digital is absolutely essential in a digital world where we know that outages, be they cyber created or created by other factors, is a reality,’ he added.
‘So, we have to make it an opportunity. The plan is there for the flesh to be put on the bones.’
Professor Sultan Mahmud, director of healthcare at BT told the same session that it was ‘missed opportunity’ that cyber security wasn’t mentioned explicitly in the 10-Year Health Plan.
‘Unless AI [artificial intelligence] is inextricably linked with cyber and resilience, right, the whole thing is built on pillars of sand,’ he added.
Michelle Corrigan, chief executive officer at Digital Care Hub added: ‘The 10-Year Plan’s got this commitment on moving more care into communities, into neighbourhoods, and we can only do that actually if you have better systems and ways of moving data between the health and social care.’
Ms Corrigan continued: ‘Now doing that does increase risk of cyber incidents, risk of issues. As Mike says, we’ve got to be able to move between analogue and digital.’
But she added: ‘So, I think there’s a real opportunity for us to take it seriously, and therefore it kind of soften that lever and help us move more care to where people already are, which is really what people want.’
