Mr. Damien McCallion:

The Deputy will be aware of the wider impact of the cyberattack on the health and social care system in terms of all of our systems, so I will not get into that. We managed to sustain the vaccination and testing and tracing systems. We had many issues relating to logistics and operations, which had to be done manually during that period. There were some issues relating to GP data, GP referrals and so on. One of the biggest impacts was on the staff. They were operating 24-7, essentially trying to build a vaccination system as we ran out a programme at pace. As a result of the cyberattack, they have now been sucked into that. As Ms Canavan noted in her opening statement, Mr. Lowry and his team at the OGCIO stepped in to support the wider development of the technology to implement this. One of the key impacts related to some of the resources. Those teams were already fully stretched with testing and tracing and vaccination systems and then had to deal with the cyber attack. They have been working almost every weekend. Members will be aware that pharmacies are now on board in the context of a new opt-in model within the vaccination programme. To illustrate the efforts of the staff, I point to the fact that last weekend they performed a major upgrade on the vaccination system to allow the pharmacy data to be brought in live, while also working with Mr. Lowry and the team to get the data transferred. Those are some of the key impacts on the resourcing side and expertise, but also in terms of some of the practical areas I mentioned earlier relating to systems that just were not accessible and for which we did not have data for a considerable period after the cyberattack, with GP data being the primary example.