A widespread IT outage in southern hospitals blocked clinicians’ access to key apps for dosage tracking, lab results, and patient notes, according to the Public Service Association (PSA).
On Tuesday, clinicians resorted to paper workarounds, causing patient delays, the association said.
“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,” PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimmons 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 staffer said he first got an email about the outages at 7:35am on Tuesday. He said Health NZ issued updates throughout the day before emailing at 8:16pm that evening to confirm resolution.
Health NZ’s staff emails attributed the outage to hardware issues, with no evidence pointed to hacking.
However, the employee said he and colleagues still faced issues on Wednesday with at least one app, which wasn’t pulling data correctly.
The employee said it might have been an unforeseeable fault, but Health NZ must own up to whether ageing, poorly maintained hardware was to blame.
The outage comes after Health NZ’s April 2025 decision to cut a third of its IT roles. The employee said the impact of those job losses, plus major slashes to the digital and data budget, was now becoming evident.
A colleague facing major profile issues had to make repeated requests and wait a week for a fix, he said.
However, Health NZ acting chief IT officer Darren Douglass said the outage showed no link to staff reductions.
“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.
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