IT glitch plunges Palmerston North hospital back into using paper and pens
Monday, 4 August 2025
An IT glitch plunged Palmerston North hospital back into using pens, paper and whiteboards to co-ordinate patient care for almost an entire day - but the public were not told.
The 20-hour IT failure last Tuesday initially saw the nurses’ strike called off locally the night before the nationwide walk out - before going ahead on Wednesday after the systems returned.
Health NZ has ordered a full review to understand what happened and prevent it from happening again. That is likely to take weeks.
A source who works within the hospital told The Post they were told internally of the outage, but were not informed to the degree of what was happening.
“You could not add a patient into the system.
“We literally were trying to track on the whiteboard, track on paper, and try and then build a backup system in the background.
“It is not a reassuring environment to try and care for patients.
They said the patients would have had an idea as the staff were under pressure, but “there was no formal communication that the systems were down, other than people saying, ‘my computer's broken, I can’t register you, I don’t know where your loved one is’”.
“The second that there is patients waiting longer than they should, it's probably fair to be transparent to the public.”
It is understood the impact of the outage was at different levels for different areas around the hospitals.
Health NZ director of operations Mid-Central Sarah Fenwick said the IT failure affected systems used to manage patient care and hospital operations.
“Thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely during the incident.
“Normal business continuity plans were enacted during the incident. This included paper-based processes to keep services running safely, while digital staff worked with vendors and Microsoft to fix the issue.
Fenwick said it was not caused by Health NZ’s own systems, or by recent changes to digital services, instead “it appears to be due to an external vendor issue, which is still being investigated”.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton was concerned that the outage “seemed to be being kept on the down low”.
Dalton said there was “a whole plethora of different digital systems” that hospitals use, with a heavy reliance in most hospitals on digital records and data.
“It's a safety risk, right?
“I would have expected that any hospital in that situation would simply be upfront about it… I wonder if that is just becoming the norm, that information is not freely shared.”
Health NZ confirmed earlier this year changes to its digital IT team - with hundred of vacant positions disestablished.
While Health NZ noted this outage was due to an “external vendor”, which it said was usually a third-party contractor who provides a service or programme, Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said they had lost “specialist data and digital staff within hospitals who know how to make the ageing IT systems work”.
“The outages at Palmerston North Hospital meant a return to a paper-based approach to many tasks which is more time-consuming and has a higher risks of mistakes.”