Wellington Hospital IT failures risk patient safety, say clinicians
Monday, 17 November 2025
Health professionals at Wellington Regional Hospital are warning frequent computer glitches and system crashes are putting patient care at risk and extending wait times.
Clinicians have been struggling behind the scenes for months with basic IT admin tasks consuming hours of their time.
Sarah Dalton, the executive director of the Association Of Salaried Medical Specialists - the senior doctors’ union - said Wellington’s “single clinical portal”, a data platform used daily to access patient information, was plagued by problems - running excruciatingly slow and crashing for hours at a time.
And it’s been having issues since March.
“There are IT failures all around the country at the moment. This is just one example of it, but this is a major one for the Wellington region.”
It meant that for patients things would be even slower. “Your appointment will not be as efficient as it could be,” Dalton said, and doctors might not be able to access the information they needed.
One hospital worker described “Wellington’s IT disaster” as a “a car crash in slow motion”.
Another said there had been “absolutely no improvement in the last six months”.
“The system is unworkable and preventing us effectively and safely delivering patient care.
“…The failure of the Wellington IT system is currently the biggest impediment in my ability to deliver effective and safe care for my patient. I am very worried that patient care will be harmed as a result of inability to access the clinical record at the appropriate time.”
An email sent widely within Wellington Hospital in late September — obtained by The Post — from Capital, Coast and Hutt Valley chief medical officer Dr André Cromhout acknowledged performance issues across the district.
A summary below the email outlined concerns about the portal and its impact on work, wellbeing and patient safety.
It lays out the issues - extended hours to compensate for the inefficiencies of the portal, frustration, stress, its unreliability affecting clinicians’ ability to deliver timely and safe care - “with potential implications for burnout and morale”.
“Repeated system downtimes compromise access to critical patient information.”
It says the portal is slow and frequently crashes which delays routine tasks like signing off blood results. Clinicians put up with failed attempts to even get into the portal and error messages, resulting in late clinic starts, late finishes and reduced patient care time.
They are dealing with intermittent failures of key functions, including access to X-rays and scans - which, in some cases, has led to cancer treatment decisions being made without imaging, increasing the risk of inappropriate therapy. Radiology ordering and other essential functions are also frequently disrupted, requiring manual follow-up and increasing the risk of missed actions.
“Clinicians are forced to make decisions with incomplete information, increasing the risk of clinical errors,” the email says.
There are “significant delays” in acute services, with junior doctor workflows severely affected — disrupting overall patient flow
Health NZ chief information technology officer Darren Douglass confirmed the portal could be slow especially during busy times and its performance and recurring outages made it harder for clinicians to access patient information quickly.
“We know this is frustrating for clinicians and can be disruptive to patient care,” he said. “While the risk is low, any disruption is taken seriously, and safeguards are in place to ensure critical patient information is not lost.
“There are a number of contributing factors including infrastructure limitations, legacy applications, database query performance, and remote access bottlenecks each of which requires different remedial actions.”
A dedicated team had been set up to fix the underlying cause. “This includes working with the vendor from this week, replacing older hardware, and improving remote access.”
Douglass said urgent care continued to be prioritised and they were working hard to minimise any impact on wait times.
Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall called the situation, “totally unsafe”.
“I can't believe this is happening. Resources to fix this must be made available immediately. These are near impossible working conditions for staff. In this day and age, ordering X-rays on paper is unbelievable.
“For patients, it's unsafe for clinicians not to be able to access the full information about their patients, and it's slowing down care. All of these information systems require maintenance and upkeep, and these types of problems are a direct result of cuts to information technology services across Health NZ.
“Patients are missing out, and it's clearly the Government's fault,” Verrall said.
Health Minister Simeon Brown called the situation an “inevitable result of Labour’s botched mega-merger of the health system”.
“The previous government thought they could simply amalgamate DHBs during the middle of a pandemic, put a new letterhead on the organisation, and say ‘job done’.
“They ignored the significant work required to modernise and properly invest in Health NZ’s digital systems, focusing instead on creating more bureaucracy.”
Also in the email, Cromhout said the portal was contributing to clinical inefficiencies, and some clinicians were considering reducing clinic throughput as a result.
“While I do not necessarily support this approach, I recognise that clinical safety and staff wellbeing must remain paramount,” he said.
Cromhout noted that any agreed reduction in throughput would need to be capped at 20% and limited to a maximum of four weeks.