Source: Radio New Zealand
Auckland and Northland hospitals were hit by an IT outage on Thursday afternoon. RNZ / Dan Cook
The Public Service Association is warning hospital IT outages will keep happening due to cuts to Health NZ’s digital team.
Auckland and Northland hospitals were hit by an outage on Thursday afternoon.
It disrupted the transfer of radiology images – including X-rays, CT and MRI scans – for two hours across both regions.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons described the outage as “critical”, forcing clinicians and radiographers to text and phone each other scan results.
“The impact of clinicians needing to resort to text and phone to pass on vital information is that mistakes are more likely, it takes longer, and when you’re dealing with patients in ED or in operating theatres, time is everything.
“It is absolutely critical that these systems are of a modern standard and that these outages don’t keep happening.”
Health New Zealand said the outage was resolved quickly on Thursday afternoon, and standard back-up processes were used while it was happening.
A spokesperson said patient care was not compromised.
Fitzsimons said no IT outage affecting critical clinical information was minor.
“These are important systems that clinicians rely on, and that need fixing because they are not set up to a modern standard, and we’ve lost the experts who know how to patch them quickly.”
She said it was the second failure in less than a month, after clinicians were forced to use pen and paper for 12 hours overnight in late January.
“More [outages] will occur, because we’ve lost the data and digital experts from Health New Zealand, after government-imposed funding cuts.”
She wanted Health New Zealand to launch a review into this outage, as it had for the [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/585415/staff-public-deserve-answers-after-major-it-outage-at-hospitals-union-says
incident on 28 January].
Health Minister Simeon Brown said he was aware of a “brief IT issue” in the northern region on Thursday.
“I want to thank staff for resolving the issue swiftly and ensuring there was no disruption to patient care.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
