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\nThere have been performance issues and recurring outages with the IT system at Wellington Hospital.
\nPhoto: RNZ \/ REECE BAKER\n<\/p>\n
The union for senior doctors says an IT system introduced this year at Wellington Hospital is a “constant risk” to patient safety.<\/p>\n
The system was very slow and crashed all the time, Sarah Dalton – head of the Association Of Salaried Medical Specialists – told Midday Report on Monday<\/a>.<\/p>\n Health New Zealand said there were “performance and stability issues” but it had safeguards in place to ensure patient information was not lost.<\/p>\n It would “keep pushing until the system is stable and reliable”.<\/p>\n RNZ has seen one email from the hospital front line that said: “Wellington’s IT disaster has become so bad that some specialists are now cancelling\/cutting back their clinics as they can’t get through all their patients.”<\/p>\n Dalton said they had been trying for months to get a meeting with Health NZ about this, which they now expected to be in a week or so, as what Health NZ had called “teething” problems got worse.<\/p>\n “We now believe the failure of the system is a constant risk both to efficiency but more concerningly to patient safety,” she said.<\/p>\n It took two to three minutes to load a screen with a patient’s information – for example, what medications a sedated patient was on – then regularly crashed when multiple screens were needed.<\/p>\n “It’s pushing back to paper-based workarounds to try and care safely for patients.”<\/p>\n Health NZ chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said performance problems arose in March, and they set up a team to fix them, including working with the supplier, replacing older hardware and improving remote access.<\/p>\n Dalton said the system would be very useful in linking all sorts of medical specialists, if it worked.<\/p>\n She understood any fixes would likely take months.<\/p>\n