There is no suggestion the outage is related to hacking, a senior employee says. Photo: RNZ
A major IT outage across southern hospitals prevented clinicians from accessing applications that track dosage information, lab results and patient notes, the Public Service Association [PSA] says.
On Tuesday, Clinicians had to resort to paper-based workarounds, resulting in delays for patients, the union said.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimmons said it was a significant outage, lasting most of the day.
"The systems that were affected were absolutely critical, including those which track medications a patient is on - the dosage and when it's due next, important systems around results, including X-rays, MRIs and blood tests, and also the applications which store patient data," she said.
"Going through manual paper processes is not ideal. We have data and digital systems and our hospitals for a reason."
A senior Health NZ employee who RNZ agreed not to name said he first received an email about the outages at 7.35am on Tuesday.
Health NZ provided further updates throughout the day, then sent an email at 8.16pm that night saying the issue had been resolved, he said.
However, the employee said he and colleagues were still having issues on Wednesday with at least one of the applications, which was not pulling data through correctly.
There was no suggestion the outage was related to hacking, he said - in its emails to staff, Health NZ said the outage was hardware related.
The employee said it may have been an unforeseeable fault, but Health NZ needed to front up on whether it was caused by old hardware that should have been better maintained or replaced already.
The outage follows a decision to cut a third of all Health NZ's IT roles in April 2025.
The employee said the impact of the job losses, and significant cuts to Health NZ's digital and data budget, were beginning to become apparent.
A colleague who had significant issues with their profile had to make repeated requests and wait a week to have someone fix the problem, he said.
"We used to deal with people who knew you by name and knew where you worked, and if they couldn't resolve it, they'd escalate it to an app specialist or infrastructure specialist, and generally respond within 24 hours. Now when you ring IT, you don't get the usual 'you're third in the queue' message, you're just told to log a ticket and wait for someone to get back to you," he said.
Health New Zealand acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said there was no indication the outage had any link to the reduction in staff.
"As a large organisation with a significant number of different applications running in different parts of the country, we do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the IT outage at Southern Hospital, which was resolved within 12 hours, and thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely during this time," Douglass said.
Health New Zealand Southern director of operations Craig Ashton said the outage lasted just over 12 hours.
One planned surgery was impacted but all outpatient appointments were able to proceed, and patient care continued safely thanks to "strong back up plans."
"Normal business continuity plans were enacted during the incident. This included manual processes to keep services running safely, while digital staff worked with vendors to fix the issue. Systems were restored by 6pm Tuesday evening, and applications quickly came back online."
Health NZ was completing an incident debrief "to identify any potential opportunities to improve our systems," Ashton said.
However, Fitzsimmons said the latest outage was also evidence of why the cuts should not have gone ahead.
"This really can be sheeted home to the government who imposed cuts on the data and digital team in Health NZ when actually those teams needed more resourcing," she said.
Health NZ's IT systems were in a mess, she said.
"What they need is significant investment to bring them up to a modern standard. We're dealing with legacy IT systems and we've lost very experienced people who understand the quirks and nuances of how these systems operate."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
