Hospital IT problems are the result of years of under-investment, experts say, and warn it will not be a quick fix.
By Kate Green of RNZ
The latest in a series of outages took five hospitals across the Waikato region - Waikato, Thames, Te Kūiti, Tokoroa, and Taumarunui - offline for 11 hours on Wednesday, caused by a connection problem with the data centre.
Staff were forced to switch to pen and paper, and Health New Zealand said some non-urgent appointments were deferred.
HNZ said 68 appointments and 15 theatre cases were deferred at Waikato Hospital, and were being rescheduled.
Robin Gauld, a professor in health systems who is now the executive dean at Bond Business School in Queensland, Australia, said it was due to years of under-investment.
Waikato Hospital outage raises questions around Health NZ's systems - Watch on TVNZ+
"Especially over the last five years or so, [New Zealand has] been systematically under-investing across pretty much every area of health, and that includes the technology side of things."
In May, Budget 2026 allocated $153.6 million over four years for HNZ to expand national cyber security monitoring and upgrade IT safety systems across the health system.
HNZ is also investing $300 million of its own budget to help deliver the first three years of the Health Digital Investment Plan, which will replace ageing devices, modernise radiology systems, and upgrade core IT platforms.
But Gauld said the "cutback mentality year-on-year" in recent times had meant technology quickly became outdated.
"It's a very, very long-term project to try and rectify under-investment in the health system, because you're talking about people often, and it takes a long time to procure people and get them in the right place," he said.
The PSA is calling out job cuts in the data and digital teams for contributing to the increasing number of outages across hospitals.
But HNZ said there was no link between the outage and staffing numbers in the digital services team.
HNZ's chief information technology officer Darren Douglass told Morning Report: "When we went through our restructure process, one of thing we were very clear about was that we were prioritising operational support for these critical systems."
Gauld said the public could help by lobbying their MPs for change.
"If they have any opportunity to interact with our political leadership, they need to be asking them how they are accountable for the state of the healthcare system, and what they expect for patients."
Health Minister Simeon Brown said in a statement: "I want to thank staff at Waikato Hospital for resolving the issue last night, and frontline teams for continuing to deliver care to their patients.
"This year's Budget invested $153.6 million in Health New Zealand's data and digital services, alongside an additional $300 million from Health New Zealand, to deliver critical IT upgrades."
Te Whatu Ora said at Waikato Hospital, 68 appointments were deferred, and 15 surgeries.
Group director of operations for Waikato, Stephanie Doe, said there was no link between this IT outage and staffing numbers in the digital services team.
On Thursday afternoon, Douglass told Checkpoint they knew which part failed, but they don't know the cause of the failure.
He said the aim was to replace parts every five to seven years, and this part was at least four years old – that is, it hadn't been replaced since the formation of HNZ out of the district health boards four years ago.
He said they did not have the funding to update everything at once.
"Investment in digital infrastructure across all of our hospital settings has been variable," he said. "In some areas we have systems that are very modern and have been kept up to date, and in other areas we have systems and technologies that haven't."
"Part of my job, and part of the team's job, is to make sure we target those areas of critical risk first and have scheduled maintenance for those components, but what we've inherited means that we don't have the ability to bring everything up to the expected life cycle in one big leap," Douglass said.
He said the issue was not with the data centre, as HNZ had confirmed other customers using the data centre had not been affected by an outage. Rather, the fault was with HNZ's own network.
"We're working closely with the vendor to establish exactly what the cause was."
SHARE ME