Health NZ / Te Whatu Ora is scrapping its current Māori-language email address, despite many staff having used it for only a few months.
The organisation is still in the process of migrating many of its 90,000 staff to its primary email domain, tewhatuora.govt.nz, with the transition having begun three years ago. In October, staff will be required to switch once more, this time to the new healthnz.govt.nz email domain.
Health NZ said the change is intended to place greater emphasis on its English name, although IT requirements meant staff first had to be migrated to the Māori-language email address.
Health NZ chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said that when the merger programme began, the organisation operated under the name Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand.
Douglass said that more recently the organisation has placed greater emphasis on its English name to establish a clearer, single national identity.
The government’s 2023 coalition agreement set out a policy requiring all public service organisations to use English as their primary name, unless they were specifically Māori-focused entities.
Prior to that, Health NZ was primarily known as Te Whatu Ora.
“It is just one part of many other changes – network access, hosting, application access, security, etc. – that need to be co-ordinated, which explains why it is taking time,” Douglass said.
Meanwhile, for the Public Service Association, which represents IT workers, the two-stage domain change was a “huge exercise” and a waste of money.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the change would not improve patient care, arguing that this should remain Health NZ’s primary focus.
She said the switch to tewhatuora.govt.nz email addresses had already caused disruption for health teams and that further disruption was expected when the domain changes again in October.
“Clinicians have had to use time-consuming workarounds; they’ve had to raise tickets with the IT helpdesk. These people have more important work to do.”
George Smith, from Health NZ’s digital team, said the organisation had the capability and resources to carry out the work.
He said that for staff already using the tewhatuora.govt.nz domain, the move to the healthnz.govt.nz domain would involve only a simple alias change.
“For others – the majority of our staff – it coincides with the necessary upgrade and migration from older ex-district systems that are reaching the end of their supported life,” he said.
“This work is required regardless, to ensure systems remain secure, reliable and fit for purpose.”