Cyber-security Strategy

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Written Statements

[The Minister for Health and Secondary Care (Will Quince)]

My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Lord Markham, has made the following written statement:

I am pleased to announce the publication of the Cyber-security Strategy for Health and Adult Social Care to 2030. The strategy sets out a vision to 2030 for a health and social care sector that is resilient to cyber-attack. It establishes cyber security as a foundational business need to ensuring patient and service user safety. Improved cyber resilience will assure availability of services, protect valuable data, enable quicker response and recovery when attacks do occur, and increase public trust.

The health and social care sector has made good progress in recent years, by making use of the increasing cyber defence and response mechanisms at its disposal, with the sector now much better protected from untargeted attack than it was at the time of the WannaCry cyber-attack in 2017. However, we still have further to go. This strategy will shape a common purpose and an approach that will be applicable across health and social care systems including for adult social care, primary care, and our critical supply chain as well as for secondary care.

Digital transformation offers huge opportunities for the sector and building cyber security into our design will be essential as we put the right technology and controls in place to realise those benefits. The five pillars in our strategy, developed collaboratively across the health and care sector, focus our approach on the most important risks to our most critical systems, while growing our cyber workforce so that we can better tackle threats in the long term. The strategy will be supported by a national implementation plan in summer 2023 which will detail activities and define metrics to build and measure resilience over the next two to three years.

[HCWS662]