Source: Radio New Zealand
There have been performance issues and recurring outages with the IT system at Wellington Hospital. RNZ / REECE BAKER
The union for senior doctors says an IT system introduced this year at Wellington Hospital is a “constant risk” to patient safety.
The system was very slow and crashed all the time, Sarah Dalton – head of the Association Of Salaried Medical Specialists – told Midday Report on Monday.
Health New Zealand said there were “performance and stability issues” but it had safeguards in place to ensure patient information was not lost.
It would “keep pushing until the system is stable and reliable”.
RNZ has seen one email from the hospital front line that said: “Wellington’s IT disaster has become so bad that some specialists are now cancelling/cutting back their clinics as they can’t get through all their patients.”
Dalton said they had been trying for months to get a meeting with Health NZ about this, which they now expected to be in a week or so, as what Health NZ had called “teething” problems got worse.
“We now believe the failure of the system is a constant risk both to efficiency but more concerningly to patient safety,” she said.
It took two to three minutes to load a screen with a patient’s information – for example, what medications a sedated patient was on – then regularly crashed when multiple screens were needed.
“It’s pushing back to paper-based workarounds to try and care safely for patients.”
Health NZ chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said performance problems arose in March, and they set up a team to fix them, including working with the supplier, replacing older hardware and improving remote access.
Dalton said the system would be very useful in linking all sorts of medical specialists, if it worked.
She understood any fixes would likely take months.
This was linked to the government and Health NZ stripping $100m and key roles – mislabelled back office, said Dalton – from data and digital teams.
“We can see here a direct negative impact on patient care.”
The Public Service Association echoed that line: “We warned the government last year that cutting IT staff at Health NZ Te Whatu Ora was playing with fire.”
Health NZ’s Douglass said clinicians had processes in place to ensure critical information was not missed.
“While the system is still working, it can be slow to access functions and open clinical documents, especially during busy times,” he said in a statement on Monday.
“This performance issue and recurring outages have made it harder for clinicians to access patient information quickly.
“While the risk is low, any disruption is taken seriously and safeguards are in place to ensure critical patient information is not lost.”
Patient safety remained the top priority and urgent care was prioritised.
“While these issues can add time to some tasks, we are working hard to minimise any impact on wait times.”
The PSA called on the privacy commissioner to investigate.
“The privacy commissioner refused our request to investigate privacy risks to patient data last year,” national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said in a statement on Monday.
“We say he needs to think again – before patients are harmed and confidential health information is compromised.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
