Latest News

Media Statment: 15 April 2021

majority of the IT systems are now restored as Eastern Health continues to manage the impacts of the recent cyber attack.

Patient services are no longer impacted by the IT issues and a backlog of appointments are being managed.

We sincerely thank our staff, patients, their families and the broader community for their understanding during what was a very challenging time across the organisation.

Media Statment: 6 April 2021

Eastern Health continues to manage the impacts of the recent cyber incident.

While a number of processes remain off-line, there is a staged return of many systems which is allowing the progressive re-introduction of some patient services.

Elective Surgery has today returned to planned levels; all those impacted by the outage will be contacted by the liaison nurses to re-book appointments.

We sincerely thank our staff, patients, their families and the broader community for the patience and understanding.

Further services will return as it is safe to do so, and updates will be provided accordingly.

Media Statment: 31 March 2021

Eastern Health Chief Executive David Plunkett and Chief Information Officer Lachlan Bakewell have shared an update in relation to the March 16 cyber incident.

CIO Lachland Bakewell recalls making the decision to shut down the network in order to retain critical systems.

"By five o'clock, I'd received a call to say that there was suspicious activity seen on the network," he said. "And I made the decision to pull our network off the internet and start to shut down our critical systems.

The attack was a ransomware attack, the intent of the attack was to take out a whole network and encrypt everything."

Importantly, patient data has been retained.

"We can reassure our patients and community that the data is safe. We've also been able to recover our file systems and things like that. And we know there's been no infection into those because of the fast and prompt action we did on that evening. There's been no sign of any exfiltration of data. So none of our data has been stolen. And we can see that our file system and things are also untouched because we turn things off quickly."

Lachlan says the recovery process has led to many insights about securing the IT systems.

"Hindsight is a wonderful thing. The whole industry plays a constant cat and mouse game with these very well versed and sophisticated cyber gangs, that perform these sorts of malicious acts.

Absolutely, we've learned a lot during this process. But we've also positioned ourselves really well to strengthen and harden our network against any further attempts."

Adj. Prof. David Plunkett, Chief Executive, at Eastern Health, has acknowledged that the cyber incident has had some impact on scheduled patient appointments.

"I'd really like to thank our patients and families and our community in general, we know that there have been some implications for them, there have been some delays," he said. "Obviously, some people have had their appointments, and their scheduled treatments have also been postponed. And I'm really sorry that that happened. And we had to do that. But our primary concern has been to make sure that we are providing the safest care that we can. And in the early phases of this, we needed to actually take some steps to make sure the staff could continue to provide care safely.

So again, I thank the community, our patients and their families for their understanding. We have received some amazing feedback from our community and our patients, particularly, who acknowledge the efforts of our staff in being able to make sure that they can continue to deliver care in a way."

As systems are brough back online, surgeries will begin to resume, and the Emergency Departments continue to run as normal.

"I'm really pleased that we've been able to maintain our access to our Emergency departments. We are seeing normal numbers of people coming through with normal conditions. We're conducting more surgery this week than we did in the earlier part of this event, this incident. And I'm really pleased about that.

Many, many of our services are continuing as they have normally, things such as our mental health service and maternity services, and our pediatric services are all operating as normal. And I'm really, really pleased that we've been able to do that. And I want to thank the staff for their efforts in being able to continue to provide that service to our patients and community."

The planned rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination program has not been affected by the cyber incident.

"The outage has not impacted our vaccination program. We have opened our community clinic in line with the timing that we said. I'm really pleased this week it opened and also that our staff, like all of our staff across Eastern Health, pivoted or were agile in moving from electronic system to a paper based system.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our staff, our patients, their families, and our community in general for their support and understanding whilst we work through this journey. We are moving as fast as we can in being able to restore all services, all systems, as quickly as we can, but the most important thing is we want to make sure we do it safely." 

Media Statment: 29 March 2021

Following the recent cyber Incident, many Eastern Health systems remain offline.

This criminal attack has caused significant disruption to our services and extensive work continues to be undertaken with the support of the state and federal governments, alongside industry IT experts.

We sincerely apologise for the delay and inconvenience this situation is causing many of our staff, patients and the broader community.

We thank you for your understanding.

Staff and patient safety remains our number one priority.

From a patient services perspective:

Media Statment: 26 March 2021

Eastern Health continues to make inroads in to the recovery from the impact of a significant cyber incident experienced last week.

While some IT systems remain offline, others have recommenced in a staged approach. Thanks to the support from government and industry IT experts who have greatly assisted during this time.

The incident has not impacted our commitment to provide patients with great care, and we thank our staff, patients and the community for their patience and understanding during this situation.

Our three Emergency Departments remain open and Category 1 scheduled surgery is still going ahead. Further expansion of patients receiving elective surgery will also occur next week.

Additional updates are expected in the coming days with regards to further resumption of services.

For any patient or community enquiries, please phone the Eastern Health Contact Centre on 1300 342 255.

Media Statment: 22 March 2021

Eastern Health continues to manage the impacts of a significant cyber incident experienced last week.

While a number of our IT systems remain offline, our Business Continuity Plans have been enacted and we continue to make inroads into our planned recovery.

Thank you to our staff, patients and visitors for their understanding at this time.

For further context:
All patient information continues to be handled with the necessary care, confidentiality and due diligence.

Eastern Health continues to accept patients at our three Emergency Departments.

Any delays experienced with our Contact Centre have been rectified and we encourage patients and the community to utilise this service if they have any queries.

COVID vaccinations for our prioritised staff continue across our sites, with our second staff clinic, Maroondah Hospital, opening today and Angliss Hospital on-track to begin later in the week.

Media Statment: 19 March 2021

Eastern Health is still experiencing significant impacts related to the cyber incident.

Thank you to our staff for their handwork continuing to deliver patient-centred care with many of our systems remaining off-line.

While we rectify the situation, our contact centre is receiving a large number of calls at the moment with callers experiencing long wait times. Check our website for information and if the situation is an emergency, please call 000.

Patients are being contacted directly as required.

Media Statment: 17 March 2021

Late on Tuesday, Eastern Health has experienced a cyber incident.

Many Eastern Health IT systems have been taken off-line as a precaution while we seek to understand and rectify the situation.  

It is important to note, patient safety has not been compromised.  

Category 1 Elective Surgery will continue as planned. However, the incident has impacted our ability to undertake less urgent (Category 2 and 3 Elective Procedures) which will be postponed to a later date.  

We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.   We thank our staff, patients and their families for patience during this situation and we will keep them informed.