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New Zealand's largest trade union has raised the alarm over repeated IT system crashes at hospitals in the Wellington and Hutt regions, warning of care delays, even as Te Whatu Ora maintains the disruptions are low-risk.
The Public Service Association (PSA) on Monday blamed the recent IT layoffs across the public health system for reported clinical portal crashes that forced doctors to make decisions without access to timely patient information.
"This is what happens when you gut the very teams that keep essential systems running. Patient safety is on the line. Sensitive patient records are at risk. The stakes could not be higher," the union said.
The PSA, citing a report in The Post, said doctors at Wellington Regional Hospital have been dealing with a Single Clinical Portal that often slows down, crashes, or goes offline, leaving them without access to key patient information, X-rays, and scans and at times forcing them to write test orders on paper.
According to The Post, the recurring outages have pushed clinic start times back, stretched shifts late into the day, and cut into time with patients as staff deal with failed logins and constant error messages. In some cases, the portal's instability has forced cancer treatment decisions to be made without imaging.
Te Whatu Ora chief IT officer Darren Douglass said they have recognised the performance and stability issues with the portal, which was first raised to them in March.
"We know this is frustrating for clinicians and can be disruptive to patient care, he said in a statement to Healthcare IT News. "While the risk is low, any disruption is taken seriously, and safeguards are in place to ensure critical patient information is not lost."
While immediate fixes were made – including speeding up patient searches – performance and stability issues persist, caused by infrastructure limitations, legacy applications, database query performance, and remote access bottlenecks, with each requiring different remedial actions, Douglass explained.
A dedicated team has been set up to fix these underlying causes, including working with the IT vendor, replacing older hardware, and improving remote access.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
The PSA noted how the IT Help Desk at Te Whatu Ora is "so understaffed, it's relying on contractors to fill the gaps – and there's still not enough staff, resulting in big delays to fix problems."
Early this year, Te Whatu Ora disestablished 610 current and 758 vacant roles in Digital Services and redeployed 447 employees, several months after proposing the move to further save on costs.
The PSA complained about these layoffs to the Employment Relations Authority in February and requested the Privacy Commissioner to investigate the move, which it claimed was a "huge gamble with patient privacy and safety."
"The Privacy Commissioner refused our request to investigate privacy risks to patient data last year. We say he needs to think again, before patients are harmed and confidential health information is compromise[d]," said the union's national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons.
