A YORK Hospital trust chief has said he wants to ‘nail' two myths about the global cyber attack which crippled its computer systems last weekend.

Mike Proctor, deputy chief executive of York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has also paid tribute to staff who worked 20 hour days over the weekend to ensure the impact of the ransomware attack on patients was 'minimal.'

York Press:

About 2,000 out of 6,000 individual computers across the trust were infected last Friday, leading to the cancellation of all planned operations last weekend and some outpatient appointments on Monday.

Mr Proctor, speaking at a health and wellbeing board meeting at City of York Council's headquarters, said: "There's still an awful lot of water to go under the bridge in terms of the investigation of this issue but there's a couple of myths around and I just want to nail one or two of those."

He said the first was that only Windows XP was affected, as the trust used Windows 7.

The second related to the patch issued by Microsoft in March to protect computers, with talk that it was the failure of trusts to apply the patch that led to them being affected.

He said that when the York trust received software updates, it couldn't just update all its computers at once, or it could, for example, delay the start of outpatient sessions.

"We have to be really careful that we test and pilot and phase the implementation of these patches," he said.

"We were part-way through the implementation of this patch when it happened."

He said some organisations that had not applied the patch had not been affected, while some parts of the York trust which had implemented the patch had still been affected, adding: "There will be lessons for us to learn."