Health New Zealand confirmed a major technology outage affecting hospitals in the lower North Island. Photo / 123rf
By Keiller MacDuff of RNZ
Health New Zealand has confirmed another major technology outage, this time for hospitals in the lower North Island.
A clinician working in one of the hospitals called the situation shambolic, while the medical specialists union said crumbling technology systems were putting both staff and patients at risk.
A range of clinical and administrative systems were down for at least six hours on Thursday, days after a widespread IT outage affected the Southern district for more than 12 hours.
Health NZ said the outage was not related to hacking or to the Southern district outage, and services continued to operate safely throughout the day.
But the healthcare worker, who RNZ agreed not to name, said the inability to access patients’ vital health information was a clinical risk.
They claimed Te Whatu Ora didn’t know which provider was managing Capital and Coast’s IT systems over the summer break.
It’s not known exactly how extensive the issues were. Health NZ would only confirm “part of the Central Region” had been affected.
An all-staff email, seen by RNZ, said Central Region, Wellington Hospital, Wairarapa Hospital and Hutt Hospital, and “staff throughout the central region” were impacted.
The email noted “a gap in knowledge around who is on-call” as an “outstanding Issue or challenge”, and warned of the risk of potential disruption to patients’ care pathways and risks to emergency departments.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton said the Single Clinical Portal – a platform used by Wellington, Hutt and Wairarapa Hospitals that provides patient data – had been malfunctioning for months.
“Health NZ admitted it had major problems late last year, and said it would take months not weeks to fix.”
That meant clinicians were already having to use workarounds on a daily basis and were suffering significant delays, she said.
Even if Thursday’s outage was not related to staffing cuts across Health NZ’s digital and data teams (which saw around a third of all roles cut last year), the ongoing inability of HealthNZ to “get across their data and digital infrastructure and to put reliable systems in place absolutely is a factor around resource constraints, budget limitations and staffing cuts”.
Some things – such as trying to search a patient’s medication history – were difficult to do manually, especially if someone was already in treatment or very unwell and may not have that information to hand, Dalton said.
“Who has that information, how are you supposed to uncover that, how can you determine what the next safe treatment step is? For our members who are senior doctors and dentists, they are the people that hold the ultimate medico-legal responsibility for care of patients, so HealthNZ as an employer is really letting them down.”
Senior data and digital staff had confirmed that when HealthNZ ran its voluntary redundancy programme last year, many more staff took that option than it was able to spare, leaving the department understaffed, she said.
Stuff reported last month that Te Whatu Ora had contracted technology consultancy firm Datacom to fill gaps on the IT service desk.
HealthNZ senior leadership and board needed to front on the ongoing issues and the impact of the budget and job cuts, Dalton said.
“I want them to take some accountability. We need to understand why they are in a position of contracting out – which we know is much more expensive – when they’ve just let many many staff go.
“We need to ask ourselves what should lie at the heart of our health system? I think what patients and communities would like is to be diagnosed and treated in a timely fashion near to where they live, but the way HealthNZ is going about their business is making healthcare harder to access and more difficult as a system for healthcare workers to work in.”
Ongoing technology issues, including the axing or deferral of more than 100 IT projects, delays to rollouts and the outages were “not a good advertisement for New Zealand being a great place to work” amid a globally competitive healthcare market, she said.
Health New Zealand group director of operations for Capital, Coast and Hutt Valley Jamie Duncan confirmed there had been “an issue with the digital infrastructure that provides access to a range of clinical and administrative systems across part of the Central Region”.
“Functional access to critical systems” had been established around 9am, and services continued to operate safely throughout, he said.
He said all systems were accessible by 4pm, and teams were working to ensure all users were fully restored.
- RNZ