Source: Radio New Zealand
Hospitals in Auckland and Northland were impacted by the outage. (File photo) 123rf.com
There are calls from the senior doctors’ union for an explanation from Health New Zealand as to what caused the most recent IT outage to hospitals in the upper North Island.
The computer systems outage happened over a 12-hour period between Wednesday night to Thursday morning.
Health NZ executive director for the northern region Andrew Brant confirmed the outage had affected several hospitals.
“Health New Zealand hospitals in Te Tai Tokerau, Waitematā, Auckland and Counties Manukau experienced an IT outage yesterday impacting some clinical and operational systems,” he said.
“The outage lasted around 12 hours with services restored to all impacted hospitals in the early hours of this morning.”
He said patient care continued safely during those hours.
“We are currently completing an incident debrief to identify any potential opportunities to improve our systems,” he said.
It comes less than a month after online portal Manage My Health was hacked and patient data held ransom.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) executive director Sarah Dalton said an outage had happened more than once recently and staff and the public deserved answers.
“We haven’t had any kind of a meaningful response from Heath New Zealand’s leadership and given the frequency of these system failures, I think the public deserves to know what’s going on in our public health system.”
Dalton said it was chaos for many staff during the outage period.
“Clinicians were unable to print patient labels, access laboratory records which means no bloods, they couldn’t book theatres, they couldn’t see patient histories online.
“Basically anything that might be recorded digitally, was unable to be accessed.”
Dalton put the outage down to the lack of resources and investment into the systems by the government.
“There is no meaningful investment and the kind of work that is needed to bring it up to scratch and to deal with issues of interoperability between community based care, hospital based care and across the country, they are just not in a place to make those things happen,” she said.
But Health New Zealand acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said there was no link between the IT outages in recent weeks and staffing numbers in the Digital Services team.
“All but one of the outages this month have been due to third party vendor issues.
“We operate a very complex technology environment, and we have monitoring and support in place across the system.
“We do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the recent IT outages where thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely.
“Since we became a single health organisation, we have been working hard to rationalise and modernise our systems, improve the quality of our data and digital platforms and ensure that they connect across the country to support and enhance healthcare delivery,” he said.
Auckland University computer scientist Dr Ulrich Speidel said the country’s systems needed a complete overhaul.
He said the systems were vulnerable due to decades of neglect.
“That dates back even to the district health boards, back then every district health board was cost under pressure, so you know, where do you go when you’re not having to save on doctors and nurses, you go and see what you can save in the IT and your trying to make your old equipment tick over,” he said.
Douglass said it had a 10-year Digital Investment Plan to modernise current systems.
“While we continue to improve and modernise our technology environment patient safety remains our priority. Our hospitals have contingency plans in place to ensure the delivery of safe patient care during and IT outage,” he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
