Regular IT outages impacting patient care, surveys find, but minister dismisses it as political

Two union surveys show thousands of Health NZ staff reporting IT problems that affect patient care, including cancelled surgeries and missed appointments.

There were 2600 responses across two surveys, one by the Public Service Association (PSA) in March - which had a 6.7 percent response rate - and another by the senior doctors' union, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), in September - with a 13.1 percent response rate.

The PSA has been campaigning for a change of government.

National Party campaign chair Simeon Brown said in a statement: "It's no coincidence that this union report has landed the day before polls close with an election authorisation from a union actively campaigning to change the Government, and New Zealanders will see it for exactly what it is.

"There is more to do, but we've made real progress in improving performance across the health system, and now is the time to stick with the plan that's working."

A spokesperson from his office pointed to the low response rate in the surveys, saying the vast majority of those surveyed didn't respond.

In the PSA survey, 77 percent of respondents said IT problems were affecting patient care, and 64 percent said they'd had more IT problems in the previous year than the year before.

Information released to the union under the Official Information Act since the report was written showed Health NZ facilities averaged more than one priority one outage a day this past year.

"A priority one outage impacts a department, hospital, district or region and systems integral for the delivery of safe care and there's immediate harm or risk to patient and staff, with no safe work around. Priority 1 also covers outages where there is significant impact if the system is unavailable for less than two hours," it said.

As part of the government's efforts to cut public service spending in 2024-25, there was a 39 percent reduction in data and digital staff employed by Health NZ.

This coincided with the merging of 20 separate IT systems into one - a project which was still a work in progress - as the district health boards (DHBs) combined to create Te Whatu Ora, or Health NZ, under the previous Labour government.

During the restructure, the number of frontline IT roles fell from at least 166 to 119, according to the PSA - a number it claimed was further reduced by hiring restrictions.

Clinicians surveyed by ASMS reported IT outages were having a direct effect on patients. A Waikato anaesthetist reported cancelling theatre surgeries because they could not access patient imaging or labs.

A doctor who specialised in lung disease said they'd once spent eight hours trying to fix their computer rather than seeing patients.

Community oral health workers reported missing appointments for children in pain because of problems which used to take 20 minutes to fix, and now took two hours.

"This happens constantly," they said. "Mondays and Tuesdays are the worst."

Digital staff blame loss of institutional knowledge, small tasks left undone

Digital staff reported small maintenance tasks that used to quietly get done were no longer done, and it was causing an increase in outages caused by things that could have been avoided.

They also attributed problems to a loss of institutional knowledge with staff who were let go.

The report claims in March the average fix time had tripled from just over a week to more than three weeks - and at one point there was a backlog of more than 4000 unresolved "tickets", or helpdesk requests.

Brown called this data "shaky", saying Health NZ had told the PSA the numbers were provisional and hadn't been through the usual validation process.

Health NZ national director of digital services and technology Gary Baird said in response to the report the agency's focus was on providing safe, stable and reliable digital services today, while modernising technology for the future.

"We operate thousands of applications across a large and complex health system," he said in a statement. "Technical issues do occur, and these are managed according to their severity and potential impact, with the highest-priority incidents receiving an immediate response."

The Health Digital Investment Plan provided a clear direction for modernisation, with major investments progressing across radiology, clinical desktop technology, cloud infrastructure and national corporate systems, he said.

Health minister criticises response rate, anonymous anecdotes and 'shaky' data

A spokesperson from Brown's office criticised the report's language and framing, and the use of anonymous anecdotes to form a conclusion about patient harm.

Some of the changes the report blamed were made in mid-2024, more than six months before Brown became health minister.

In fact, they said, in March 2025, shortly after taking over, the minister asked Health NZ to go back and make sure its systems could still be supported, and when the final decisions were made in April, the changes were smaller than first proposed.

"Its case also rests heavily on IT outages, but it doesn't show any of them were caused by staffing levels. Health NZ has said major outages earlier this year were caused by third-party hardware and data centre failures, and that there's no link between outages and staff numbers. There's no data in the report on how many outages there were before or after the changes."

Current IT worker says problems persist as staff navigate multiple systems

RNZ spoke to PSA president Virgil Iraia, who works as a technical support analyst at Health NZ.

"Things tend to be time-critical once they hit us, and then to avoid a major incident we have to quickly scramble to get the particular system online or try and work through the issues," she said.

One of the challenges was working across multiple systems, he said - a hangover from the days of the DHBs.

"I knew my district, we knew the ins and outs, we knew how to get things going again," he said. "Now, I can't say that's the case."

"We do the best we can, but the processes [are] letting us down."

He confirmed a lot of knowledge had been lost when subject-matter experts left the agency.

"There's been some areas where there's been great handover notes, there's other areas that haven't had any, or we can't find anything on record to support particular area or district."

Work was underway to improve things, but it was "taking a while for things to get done," he said.

As for the number of priority one outages?

"That sounds about right - one a day."