The outage at hospitals in Auckland and Northland left clinicians unable to communicate with each other or access patient records and forced them to use pen and paper and whiteboards. The PSA is pointing the finger at cuts to Health NZ’s IT team, which it says left too few experts to fix outdated IT systems when they break down. Douglass said technicians had responded “very quickly” to the intermittent technical issue, drawing on teams locally and multiple vendor partners overseas. “We know that we need to take a national approach in order to drive maximum value out of the money we do spend. It was pure luck.”Problems included issues accessing people’s blood type, and patients missing out on care in theatre, she said.
