NZ News
Health NZ confirms another major tech outage
Health New Zealand has confirmed another major technology outage, this time for hospitals in the lower North Island.
A clinician working in one of hospitals called the situation shambolic, while the medical specialists union said crumbling technology systems were putting both staff and patients at risk.
A range of clinical and administrative systems were down for at least six hours on Thursday, days after a widespread IT outage affected the Southern district for more than 12 hours.
Health NZ said the outage was not related to hacking or to the Southern district outage, and services continued to operate safely throughout the day.
But the healthcare worker, who RNZ agreed not to name, said the inability to access patients’ vital health information was a clinical risk.
They claimed Te Whatu Ora didn’t know which provider was managing Capital and Coast’s IT systems over the summer break.
It’s not known exactly how extensive the issues were. Health NZ would only confirm “part of the Central Region” had been affected.
An all staff email, seen by RNZ, said Central Region, Wellington Hospital, Wairarapa Hospital and Hutt Hospital, and “staff throughout the central region” were impacted.
The email noted “a gap in knowledge around who is on-call” as an “outstanding Issue or challenge,” and warned of the risk of potential disruption to patients care pathways and risks to emergency departments.
Sarah Dalton Photo: LDR / Stuff / Kevin Stent
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton said the Single Clinical Portal – a platform used by Wellington, Hutt and Wairarapa Hospitals that provides patient data – had been malfunctioning for months.
“Health NZ admitted it had major problems late last year, and said it would take months not weeks to fix.”
That meant clinicians were already having to use work arounds on a daily basis and were suffering significant delays, she said.
Even if Thursday’s outage was not related to staffing cuts across Health NZ’s digital and data teams (which saw around a third of all roles cut last year), the ongoing inability of HealthNZ to “get across their data and digital infrastructure and to put reliable systems in place absolutely is a factor around resource constraints, budget limitations and staffing cuts.”
Some things – such as trying to search a patient’s medication history – were difficult to do manually, especially if someone was already in treatment or very unwell and may not have that information to hand, Dalton said.
“Who has that information, how are you supposed to uncover that, how can you determine what the next safe treatment step is? For our members who are senior doctors and dentists, they are the people that hold the ultimate medico-legal responsibility for care of patients, so HealthNZ as an employer is really letting them down.”
Senior data and digital staff had confirmed that when HealthNZ ran its voluntary redundancy programme last year, many more staff took that option than it was able to spare, leaving the department understaffed, she said.
Stuff reported last month that Te Whatu Ora had contracted technology consultancy firm Datacom to fill gaps on the IT service desk.
‘I want them to take some accountability’
HealthNZ senior leadership and board needed to front on the ongoing issues and the impact of the budget and job cuts, Dalton said.
“I want them to take some accountability. We need to understand why they are in a position of contracting out – which we know is much more expensive – when they’ve just let many many staff go.
“We need to ask ourselves what should lie at the heart of our health system? I think what patients and communities would like is to be diagnosed and treated in a timely fashion near to where they live, but the way HealthNZ is going about their business is making healthcare harder to access and more difficult as a system for healthcare workers to work in.”
Ongoing technology issues, including the axing or deferral of more than 100 IT projects, delays to roll outs and the outages were “not a good advertisement for New Zealand being a great place to work” amid a globally competitive health care market, she said.
Health New Zealand group director of operations for Capital, Coast and Hutt Valley Jamie Duncan confirmed there had been “an issue with the digital infrastructure that provides access to a range of clinical and administrative systems across part of the Central Region.”
“Functional access to critical systems” had been established around 9am, and services continued to operate safely throughout, he said.
He said all systems were accessible by 4pm, and teams were working to ensure all users were fully restored.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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