Waikato hospitals revert to paperwork after major IT outage

Hospitals in the Waikato district have been forced to do everything manually after a major IT outage. A massive IT outage is affecting hospitals across the Waikato region. Health NZ spokesperson Stephanie Doe said a "network connectivity issue" had cut access to a number of applications used in Waikato hospitals.

This included Waikato, Thames, Te Kūiti, Tokoroa and Taumaranui. "Where clinical systems are impacted, hospitals are reverting to manual processes to support continuity of care. She said hospitals were prioritising urgent care and impacted patients would be contacted directly.

Patients who have not been contacted should attend their appointments as normal. She said the health agency was working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. But an email to staff said a timeline to resolve the issue was unknown.

It said theatres would continue for urgent and prioritised care. Outpatient clinics have been postponed and the laboratory would be prioritising critical tests. Radiology was to use a paper-based request system and could review images, but not send results.

The email said impacts were varied across services "depending on whether applications are hosted on local servers or not". After another IT outage to hospitals in the upper North Island earlier this year, Auckland University computer scientist Dr Ulrich Speidel told RNZ the country's health IT systems were vulnerable due to decades of neglect. "That dates back even to the district health boards, back then every district health board was cost under pressure, so where do you go when you're not having to save on doctors and nurses, you go and see what you can save in the IT and your trying to make your old equipment tick over, he said.