Health New Zealand today confirmed an IT outage which impacted hospitals across Auckland and Northland – with the Public Service Association pointing out it's the second "critical failure" in less than a month.
The hour-long outage "was resolved quickly without impacting the delivery of patient services", a spokesperson for the government agency told 1News in a statement.
"The outage impacted the transfer of radiology images at hospitals across Auckland and Northland. During the outage standard back up processes were used for the reviewing of radiology images.
"Services were fully restored within two hours and there was no impact on patient care."
Last month, a major IT outage forced hospitals across Auckland and Northland to resort to pen and paper for 12 hours overnight.
New Zealand's largest trade union, the Public Service Association (PSA), said patient safety was "again being put at risk because of government underfunding".
The outage impacted systems which stored and managed medical images from X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs and the Northland region was "continuing to experience issues", the PSA said
Fleur Fitzsimmons, the national secretary for the PSA, said the "second critical failure" was "again exposing how fragile the hospital IT systems are".
"The ]picture archiving and communications system] impacted by the outage is a critical function of our hospitals which clinicians rely on to access images so they can assess and treat patients needing urgent treatment in EDs, in operating theatres and elsewhere," she said.
"The outage means clinicians and radiographers must communicate by text and phone to pass on vital information from scans. Without a doubt this will slow down treatment, compromising care."
She said the Government "shouldn’t need another wake-up call".
"Does someone have to die before urgent action is taken? New Zealanders deserve better, we can’t afford to wait.
"This comes after we warned the Government of the consequences of severely downsizing Health NZ’s digital services team, but it still ploughed on with significant cuts.
"This is 2026 – our health system should not be grinding to a halt because of preventable IT failures."
Fitzsimmons reiterated the PSA's earlier calls for the Government to "immediately review funding for health digital services and IT infrastructure, admit its mistakes in cutting digital services expertise and commit to properly resourcing IT system upgrades and maintenance".
'No link' between outages and staff numbers – Health NZ
In a statement last month, Health NZ acting chief information technology officer - digital services Darren Douglass told 1News there was "no link between IT outages in recent weeks and staffing numbers in the Digital Services team at Health New Zealand".
"All but one of the outages this month have been due to third party vendor issues," Douglass said.
"We operate a very complex technology environment, and we have monitoring and support in place across the system.
"We do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the recent IT outages where thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely."
He said a 10-year Digital Investment Plan, announced in November and approved by Cabinet, was in place to "move to a modern, unified, and resilient digital health system".
"While we continue to improve and modernise our technology environment patient safety remains our priority. Our hospitals have contingency plans in place to ensure the delivery of safe patient care during an IT outage."
SHARE ME