King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has confirmed that a patient died and that a patient safety incident investigation identified a long wait for a blood test result — caused by the attack on Synnovis — as one of a number of contributing factors.
The trust met the family and shared the findings with them. No identifying detail has been released, and none is sought here.
What The Finding Says, And What It Does Not
It says a delay attributable to the incident contributed. It does not say the attack caused the death, and the investigation itself is careful about that: contributing factors were plural.
This desk reproduces that phrasing rather than compressing it. A headline that reads "ransomware killed a patient" asserts a causal claim the investigation declined to make, and the finding is grave enough without improving on it.
Why The Corpus Records It At All
Because the argument this database has made for hundreds of files is that availability harm is real, uncounted and mostly invisible, and the standing objection to that argument is that nobody can show it reaching a person.
Here an NHS trust, investigating itself under a patient safety process, has connected an outage to a death. That is not a vendor estimate or a modelled figure. It is the mechanism the corpus filed at 25-1219 as missing — the one that connects an incident to a person — appearing once, in one direction, in the most serious form it could take.
It Is A Single Case And It Stays A Single Case
One finding does not license an estimate of how often this happens, and this desk is not going to produce one. The corpus refused a pattern claim built on two incidents at 25-0922b; a claim built on one would be worse.
What it does establish is that the category is not hypothetical. Everything the database says about unmeasured availability harm now has one documented instance underneath it, and no way to know how many others were never investigated in these terms.
The death occurred on the day the attack began. The trust’s confirmation came a year later, which is how long a patient safety investigation and its disclosure take.
Based on the trust’s confirmation and contemporaneous reporting of the patient safety incident investigation, listed below. Graded high: the finding originates with the trust’s own investigation. The investigation identified the delayed result as one of a number of contributing factors and this file does not restate that as causation. No identifying detail about the patient has been published by the trust and none is inferred here. This file is dated to the incident; the confirmation followed in June 2025. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.
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