A computer glitch has wiped years of work by 690 staff at Waikato Hospital.
The lost data, which includes countless emails and personal work files, was information that was backed-up in the hospital's storage area network, The Waikato Times reports. The hospital is spending at least $60,000 tryingto retrieve the information and has hired experts in the United States.
A doctor who did not want to be named, said his loss was huge.
"Overall you're looking at thousands and thousands of hours of work of reports, letters, communications, teaching material, guidelines. There's no patient records; it's nothing anybody will die from but it's all the stuff that I do in my non-clinical, my own, time, in terms of educating myself and my junior doctors and nurses."
It is not clear what caused two disks in the hospital's computer storage area to fail on Sunday, October 21, or whether the resulting damage was due to computer or human error.
Waikato District Health chief executive Craig Climo said he believed contributing factors taken as a whole were likely to have led to the problem.
