{"id":865428,"date":"2026-08-23T10:47:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/865428\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T10:47:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:47:10","slug":"too-much-for-the-system-to-bear-sdpr-leaders-rethink-rollout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/865428\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Too much for the system to bear\u2019: SDPR leaders rethink rollout"},"content":{"rendered":"

The original plan to simultaneously roll out NSW Health\u2019s $2bn digital patient record across four health districts in November has been abandoned after senior executives concluded doing all four together would be \u2018too much for the system to bear\u2019. <\/p>\n

Acting Single Digital Patient Record Implementation Authority chief executive Wendy Hoey met with chief executives of the affected local health districts last Friday to discuss the planned Tranche B rollout, ahead of the decision to dramatically scale back the November implementation.<\/p>\n

The original schedule would have seen the Epic electronic medical record rolled out across Northern Sydney, Central Coast, Mid North Coast, and Northern NSW local health districts in November, alongside the remainder of the Laboratory Information Management System North network.<\/p>\n

Instead, Northern Beaches Hospital will be the only Tranche B site to proceed in November, with the timetable for the remaining districts yet to be determined.<\/p>\n

According to an anonymous source, Ms Hoey and other senior managers told an internal SDPRIA meeting this morning that the four remaining LHDs could not simply be separated into individual implementations because of the architecture of their existing electronic medical record systems.<\/p>\n

Northern Sydney and Central Coast must go live together because they shared an EMR platform, while Mid North Coast and Northern NSW were similarly linked.<\/p>\n

However, attempting both pairs simultaneously was now considered too great a burden on the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t do the four together, can\u2019t do the two centre instances together. It\u2019s just too much for the system to bear,\u201d the meeting was told.<\/p>\n

Northern Sydney indicated it would like its rollout with Central Coast to proceed around March 2027, although no final decision was made beyond rolling out Northern Beaches Hospital\u2019s integration in November.<\/p>\n

\u201cNorthern Sydney would love to still go around March,\u201d the meeting was told.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s capacity, money, if we can do that even, they would love to do that, but we don\u2019t know whether they could do that or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senior management discussed developing an options paper examining how the revised rollout could proceed and the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.<\/p>\n

Beyond Northern Beaches, however, there was currently no settled timetable.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs for the rest of it, the message to the system is that we don\u2019t know yet because we\u2019re taking this pause to rebase it and think clearly about what\u2019s the best way forward,\u201d the meeting was told.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to make any quick decisions. So we\u2019re just stopping and thinking at this point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comments provided new insight into the decision revealed by Health Services Daily exclusively this morning<\/a> to split Tranche B following a Go-Live Readiness Assessment.<\/p>\n

SDPRIA chief executive Dr Teresa Anderson \u2013 who as of tonight is on four weeks\u2019 annual leave \u2013 told staff the phased approach would allow the authority to apply lessons from earlier implementations and support continuing stabilisation and optimisation work, while NSW Health deputy secretary Elizabeth Wood said it would help ensure the capacity and wellbeing of teams implementing Tranche B and subsequent stages.<\/p>\n

This morning\u2019s internal meeting also revealed the demands successive go-lives and post-implementation \u201chypercare\u201d periods were placing on SDPRIA staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone recognises that the hypercare put a huge demand on all of our staff,\u201d the meeting was told.<\/p>\n

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Management said future schedules would have to take account of the authority\u2019s workload and the amount of time teams needed to recover between implementations.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow long do we need between sort of hypercare and a go-live to give everybody a little bit of downtime and a little bit of a life,\u201d one senior executive said.<\/p>\n

The workforce pressures have emerged as a significant issue for the program.<\/p>\n

A recent psychosocial risk assessment<\/a> of SDPRIA found 84% of participating staff were \u201cstruggling or unwell\u201d, while 73% reported feeling emotionally exhausted for a large part or all of the time and 65% reported physical exhaustion.<\/p>\n

Management also acknowledged the authority itself needed time following its first go-lives to embed operational procedures and structures before proceeding with subsequent tranches.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need the time to embed those practices,\u201d this morning\u2019s meeting was told.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, it\u2019s not just about the go-lives, it\u2019s actually about operationally structuring ourselves, managing all of those services and planning for those next tranches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Executives said there were reasons to expect some subsequent deployments could prove less difficult than Hunter New England LHD, which moved from paper-based processes.<\/p>\n

The next LHDs were already using Cerner electronic medical records and were described at the meeting as \u201cdigitally literate\u201d, meaning they were not expected to experience the same scale of practice and workflow changes.<\/p>\n

But management said the experience of the initial deployments meant the time required for implementation and hypercare \u2013 and the downtime needed before teams started again \u2013 had to be carefully considered.<\/p>\n

The decision to split Tranche B left Northern Beaches Hospital scheduled to go live sometime in November, with the precise date still being worked through.<\/p>\n

\u201cNorthern Beaches will be going at some time in November, as early as possible,\u201d the meeting was told.<\/p>\n

Planning for the two remaining paired deployments \u2013 Northern Sydney LHD with Central Coast LHD, and Mid North Coast LHD with Northern NSW LHD \u2013 would continue as the SDPRIA worked through its revised schedule.<\/p>\n

Also in today\u2019s edition:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The original plan to simultaneously roll out NSW Health\u2019s $2bn digital patient record across four health districts in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":865429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,32235,137,500,43842,339255,339256],"class_list":["post-865428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-digital-health","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-nsw-health","tag-sdpr","tag-sdpria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}