Outages and impacts on the IT system sporadically hit both Dunedin and Southland Hospitals on Tuesday.
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) said in a statement it had been approached by members in the Southland Hospital’s inpatient mental health unit who were concerned about their immediate safety, which was compromised by the outage.
The statement said the mental unit had had an active provisional improvement notice for the unit in place since March this year, relating to safety concerns.
As a direct result of the IT failure, the duress alarm system for the ward went down. There was no capacity for nurses to safely move around the ward.
In recent situations, nurses have been confronted by patients blocking their exits.
Backup processes of emergency push buttons were not accessible at the location of the incident, nor did the push buttons reliably notify security of issues occurring. In these instances, duress alarms were essential, the organisation said.
No security was put in place, despite awareness of critical risk to member safety posed by the IT outage.
The incident was further exacerbated by the ward having high patient acuity and being over capacity at 22 patients when there was only capacity for 16, the statement said.
The overcapacity ward created a high workload for the registered nurses and the IT failures put members at risk of serious harm in a very volatile environment.
Health New Zealand (HNZ) digital operations director James Allison outlined what happened in the hospitals.
An outage affecting some HNZ network services in the Southern district occurred about 12.30pm on Tuesday, caused by a failed software upgrade, he said.
Service was partially restored by 3.30pm and the problem was fully resolved and confirmed restored by 7.30pm.
He did not answer questions about the wider impact on the hospitals and whether it could happen again.
The hospitals have had history with IT issues, a spell of them impacting Dunedin Hospital for weeks late last year.
