Hackers heap misery on Waikato DHB cancer patients

Wednesday, 26 May 2021

Lara Wall was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma in March and is receiving chemotherapy during the Waikato District Health Board's hacking crisis.

As Waikato DHB’s cyber crisis deepened into a national emergency, Lara Wall saw from her cancer bed the havoc the hackers had created.

Wall was diagnosed in March with advanced Hodgkin Lymphoma and has been undergoing chemotherapy since.

But a ransomware cyber attack that came in the early hours of Tuesday last week, downing Waikato DHB’s entire system, has massively impacted operations in the hospital.

* 2020 stocktake found health IT systems vulnerable to 'significant' cyber attacks

* The question of liability in cyber-attacks

Wall, a 26-year-old mother of one, said while the cyber attack hasn’t directly affected her chemotherapy treatment, many other things are taking a lot longer than they normally would, leaving patients and medics frustrated.

Lara Wall, pictured with husband Jordazhe Wall and son Theo, was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkins Lymphoma in March and is currently receiving chemotherapy.

Instead of the usual quick reactions and digital notes, doctors are now scribbling things on whiteboards and nurses are having to hand deliver test results around the building.

The mundane task of moving information around that allows a hospital catering to thousands of patients to work is simply no more.

Keyboard criminals in the shadows, demanding an as yet unknown ransom, have strangled the simple flow of information that can save lives.

An infection sent Wall to Waikato Hospital last week, but a visit that would normally take two hours instead took eight.

Taking bloods was delayed, and then they had to be hand delivered.

Even talking to the clinicians with the background on her case was made difficult by the outage. Staff couldn’t call Wall’s haematologist as they didn’t have his number and the hospital switchboard was offline.

Sending someone up to haematology was the plan, until Wall realised she had the number for her nurse, and could call her.

It was a small light in the dark void of a hospital working with almost with no prior knowledge of those who needed its care the most.

“They couldn’t look up my records,” said Wall. “They didn’t know anything unless I told them.”

Wall has an advantage - a background in nursing means she could relay the information relatively easily.

But she’s keenly aware of other patients – someone’s mum, dad, gran or other loved one - who might not have as good a grasp on their medical history.

“For the normal person, they might not know enough about their health conditions to relay itand that’s all [hospital staff] have to go off.”

When Wall received her cancer diagnosis she was called urgently to the emergency department and told by her haematologist she had a lot of cancer.

This included a 20cm tumour in her chest, which was encasing her major blood vessels and threatening the blood supply to her head and arm.

Due to the severity of her symptoms, and the advancement of her cancer, she was told that day she would have to start chemotherapy immediately.

The diagnosis came after Wall found a lump in her neck while driving to work.

“I then got referred to a specialist at the hospital and after multiple urgent tests and admissions, including a CT scan, a total of nine biopsies and one surgery [I was diagnosed].”

A radiation oncologist at Waikato DHB discusses how patients are being treated, following a cyber attack that crippled its services. This video was first published on May 26, 2021.

Wall said if she was going through that process in the midst of the cyber attack, she thinks it would have taken twice as long to be diagnosed.

“Who knows what would have happened then? It’s kind of a scary thought.

“It’s difficult when you’re young because people assume you will be healthy, so they put you to the side more.”

Her friends haven’t though, with a Give A Little page been set up by one as Wall takes her nursing hat off and gets used to life in a patient’s gown.

Health bosses haven’t ruled out sending some cancer patients to Australia for radiation therapy treatment as Waikato machines sit silent – robbed of the patient records and data they need to save lives.

The linear accelerators run on software which can’t be used in the wake of a cyber attack, the DHB confirmed.

Treatment across the ditch is an option clinical teams have raised, Waikato DHB executive director of hospital and community services Chris Lowry said on Tuesday.

However, the DHB must first consider whether all New Zealand capacity is used, without displacing patients in those areas, she said.

Since the cyber attack began, three patients have been transferred to Auckland DHB for urgent care.

Plans have been developed for approximately 70 patients who were on treatment at the time of the incident.

Already 18 of their most clinically prioritised patients had been seen, at either the Kathleen Kilgour Centre in Tauranga or the Bowen Icon Cancer Centre in Wellington.

The rest were in the process of being seen either this week or the following week.

Wall knows there’s a long road ahead in her treatment.