A lengthy IT outage affecting hospitals across Auckland and Northland has been blamed by the Public Service Association (PSA) on government cuts to Health NZ’s digital services team, which it says left clinicians unable to access patient information or communicate electronically for more than 12 hours.
The union said staff were forced to revert to pen-and-paper systems, warning the disruption exposed the risks of underfunding digital health infrastructure, particularly coming weeks after the Manage My Health data breach.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons accused the government of losing critical digital expertise and called for an urgent funding review, while Health NZ and the Ministry of Health have been approached for comment.
“The government has to take the blame for this – these failures are a direct result of its short-sighted decision to underfund and cut roles at Health NZ’s digital services team,” Fitzsimons said.
“The government oversaw the loss of the very experts who maintain and upgrade these critical systems, and now we’re seeing the predictable consequences – hospitals forced onto whiteboards and paper forms while trying to deliver modern healthcare.”
Image credit: Getty Images
Typical useless PSA what a joke – the jab caused this all, PSA caused so many people to lose there jobs for nothing!
The nz health IT systems have been unstable for years.
You d..b…s, does it ever dawn on any of these statist stooges that ANY outage (and there will be many to come because elektruzzity and data might be compromised in many ways) will cause mayhem to any public service relying on cloud/meta-centers/data-banks, and will therefore cause DEATH to the sheeple?
But what’s new? Looks like a intermediate planning exercise.
Stooges (docs, surgeons, nurses, management) who are misled/corrupted/bought by the central onion agents will NOT be able to palm it off with “Hey, I just followed orders”.
Why? Because they will not have a book-deal or BS post in Boston or London. Are these stooges too per-occupied as water carriers to see the writing on the wall?
Whatever the politics, repeated outages show the system needs stronger redundancy and disaster recovery. “Pen and paper” shouldn’t be the fallback for modern hospitals—what’s the plan and budget to harden critical ED/lab/inpatient systems?
Successive Labour and National led governments have seen NZ’s healthcare systematically underfunded, with money squandered on wasteful crap like songs for fucking whales and the Ukraine dictatorship. Please join me and don’t vote for more of the same.
Wow, this is so frustrating to read about, especially after the Manage My Health breach too. It’s crazy to think that hospitals across Auckland and Northland were forced back to pen and paper just because of these digital cuts. The PSA really makes a good point about underfunding here; you just don’t realize how much we rely on these digital systems until they totally fail. It really highlights why having robust, secure systems is so important, not just for convenience but for patient safety. For anyone interested in more on digital security, a site like hydraheli2.org actually has some really good info.