Ransomware’s Effect on Patient Safety

**Executive summary:** This report examines the prevalence and impact of ransomware on healthcare organisations, reviewing statistical trends, high-profile incidents (including Düsseldorf, HSE and WannaCry), studies linking IT outages and data breaches to worsened patient outcomes, common attack vectors, and gaps in evidence; it recommends deeper retrospective analyses, simulations and international collaboration to better quantify short-, medium- and long-term effects on patient morbidity and care resilience.