The moves come as the government and Health New Zealand (HNZ) look to make nationwide savings of $100 million on HNZ’s IT resources.
But Public Service Association (PSA) national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the loss of local IT service desk support was creating a growing crisis that was ‘‘frustrating health workers and compromising patient care’’.
‘‘The dedicated service desk analysts team for Otago and Southland, which held specialist knowledge of how IT operated in the region’s hospitals, has been disbanded.
‘‘The workers providing the service have been redeployed and the service desk function shifted to centralised hubs based in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
‘‘It’s just crazy, really.’’
Technical fixes that should take minutes were stretching into hours or days because centralised teams lacked the local context to troubleshoot effectively, Ms Fitzsimons said.
‘‘This has all been about saving dollars, not saving lives. The government’s obsession with cutting so-called ‘back office’ roles has created a structural failure that is now a danger to patients.’’
This is not the first time HNZ has restructured its IT resources — over the past two years HNZ has cut nearly 1000 IT roles nationwide, while IT support within HNZ was slashed from 130 to 90 roles.
But HNZ acting chief IT officer George Smith said digital services were not being withdrawn from any public hospitals.
‘‘While IT support services are being consolidated under our new operating model, we are also actively strengthening local presence as needed.
‘‘We will have digital site leads at most major district locations to provide on-site assistance and co-ordination for local staff.
‘‘As staff resignations arise we are being very deliberate in recruiting into locations where we are seeking a strong on-site presence and/or consolidating into centres of excellence.’’
Since last year there have been significant outages affecting clinicians and patients at Auckland, Northland, Waikato and Wellington regional hospitals.
Ms Fitzsimons said the same could happen at southern hospitals if the IT systems went through the same upheaval.
‘‘When it comes to treating people in hospital, every moment counts, and if critical apps like patient notes or medication are down, there is a higher chance of delay or even mistakes.’’
The changes to the log-on system had also caused particular difficulties.
‘‘Previously, our members have experienced situations such as a doctor travels from another district to run clinics in Otago. When they arrive they are unable to log in on to the Otago system as it is different from the ones that are in use in their home district.
‘‘Whenever this happened previously they would approach the locally based help desk technicians, who understood the local systems well to log them in.
‘‘Now they will have to log a ticket and hope that someone from somewhere around the country will pick up the ticket and be able to help them.
‘‘There are presently 8000 outstanding tickets, so instead of getting a login in minutes, we’re now looking at a wait of hours or even days.’’
Mr Smith countered that the new model allowed HNZ ‘‘to provide additional digital expertise and capacity to the Otago-Southland region from our other locations around the country, which previously wasn’t available to them’’.
‘‘Our approach to meeting local needs is evolving to leverage better national capacity and expertise to support all districts. This, combined with dedicated on-site technical support, will ensure staff receive appropriate help when it’s needed.
‘‘We acknowledge that we have been through a period of significant change, but remain focused on progressing the work needed to simplify and modernise our digital health environment.’’
