New Zealand's largest trade union has raised the alarm over repeated IT system crashes at hospitals in the Wellington and Hutt regions, warning of care delays. Doctors at Wellington Regional Hospital have been dealing with a Single Clinical Portal that often slows down, crashes, or goes offline, leaving them without access to key patient information, X-rays, and scans and at times forcing them to write test orders on paper. In some cases, the portal's instability has forced cancer treatment decisions to be made without imaging.
Te Whatu Ora chief IT officer Darren Douglass said they have recognised the performance and stability issues with the portal, which was first raised to them in March. While immediate fixes were made – including speeding up patient searches – performance and stability issues persist, caused by infrastructure limitations, legacy applications, database query performance, and remote access bottlenecks, with each requiring different remedial actions. A dedicated team has been set up to fix these underlying causes, including working with the IT vendor, replacing older hardware, and improving remote access.
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