Documents reveal Health NZ knew IT job cuts would risk patient care, hospital resilience

Source: Radio New Zealand

Health NZ knew cutting data and digital staff would increase risks to patient care and hospital resilience, and require one-off investment to mitigate, according to a newly released internal document.

The report, titled End user impact of digital change – consequences – was written in April 2025 and details the likely impact of a restructure which would cut hundreds of IT positions. It was released to the PSA union under the Official Information Act.

It said many of the risks could be mitigated by investment and keeping key staff in service desk, support and training roles – but long-term risk remained.

“The long-term forecast for these risks (i.e, with fewer people and less knowledge; and with an ageing IT ecosystem) is that the risk rating will almost certainly elevate as technical debt becomes unsustainable and the modernisation/transformation required to meet the future needs of the sector is delayed,” the report said.

Those risks would need to be mitigated further down the track, through further investment.

Health NZ said because of the report, it had built targeted mitigations into its plans for change.

The changes came as part of a push from the government to increase efficiency and cut wasteful spending across the public sector, with departments ordered to make savings of between 6.5 and 7.5 percent.

In April last year, Health NZ confirmed sweeping cuts to a third of IT roles.

That would take data and digital roles from 2000 to 1460.

There are currently 200 vacant positions.

Health NZ said before the change process began in May last year the total number people employed was 1412.

But, that did not take into account the roughly 600 roles that were already vacant and not being filled.

In the past two months, there were a number of major IT outages – a six-hour outage in the lower North Island in mid January, a 12-hour outage at Auckland and Northland hospitals in late January, and another for those same hospitals in late February.

According to the report, the proposed changes would leave the system vulnerable.

It already had low baseline resilience due to a lack of business continuity plans, and “minimal” “hot failover” mechanisms – that is, systems which automatically took over when a system failed, without the input of a person, the report said.

“It is important to note issues and risks attributed to Digital Services are already present in our environment due to legacy technologies, fragmentation and increasing pressure from external threats, such as cyber,” it said.

Despite the intent of the change being to save money, the report said one-off investment would be required to mitigate the risks cutting staff would create. The report did not say how much that might cost.

Regional and isolated sites, such as Rotorua, Gisborne, New Plymouth, Whanganui, Masterton, Nelson, Greymouth and Timaru, would be left more vulnerable than others, due to losing staff who performed multiple jobs.

Service desk calls had already progressively increased over the past six months before the report’s writing “due to staff attrition and the pause on hiring”.

“This trend is expected to tick upwards post restructure with an estimated average wait time of approx. 2 minutes per caller. Call abandonment times (i.e., staff hanging up), are also anticipated to increase from a current rate of 15 percent to 19 percent post-restructure, under the current proposal.”

Due to the reduction in staff resolving incidents and service requests, total call numbers were expected to increase under the proposal, exacerbated by an increase in callers checking on the status of their requests.

The report said a number of Hauora Māori organisations, community services and NGO sites would be left unsupported, as they currently received outreach and support from Health NZ Digital Services, but did not have formal agreements in place – for example, Te Puia Springs in Tāi Rāwhiti.

“Post-change Digital Services will not have ability to flex services to meet the needs of these types of stakeholders,” it said.

PSA says more outages and data breaches will follow

PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the document was a crystal-clear warning that reducing people would lead to increased clinical risk – and that was ignored in the restructure.

Health NZ and the minister ignored internal warnings about how the impacts of the downsizing, she said.

“In recent months we have seen the consequences of this rushed, ill considered drive to meet the government’s arbitrary funding cuts at a time when public health was already facing a funding crisis,” she said.

“Make no mistake, the risks to cuts in data and digital were well understood by Health New Zealand and should never have occurred.”

Health NZ says it is managing the risks

In response to questions from RNZ, Health NZ’s acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass confirmed the report had identified that any reduction of that scale would carry risks if not actively managed.

“That is why targeted mitigations were built into the final proposal, including prioritising critical clinical systems, retaining additional operational support roles, strengthening regional digital leadership, and adding funded transition roles to support frontline services,” he said.

Health NZ was still transitioning to the new ways of working and was still making changes to risk management, he said.

The organisation had many different systems working in different parts of the country so did sometimes experience “technical issues”.

“Fortunately, the majority of incidents are resolved quickly. We also have well-established contingencies in place to manage issues when they arise, to ensure patients continue to get the care they need.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand