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Union hits back at 'astonishing' Health NZ cuts (www.rnz.co.nz)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Dave to c/politics

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Health New Zealand's new strategy to "fail early, fail often, succeed over time" when it comes to crucial data and digital operations has been labelled "unacceptable" by a union.

Te Whatu Ora has proposed to cut almost half its data and digital positions - more than 1000 of them.

PSA assistant secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said New Zealanders would not accept that Health NZ could ever fail early when it came to health records.

"The stakes are too high. I think it's quite shocking."

But the feedback leaked to RNZ displayed a lot of fear and consternation. Staff had got letters about the proposed jobs being cut.

"My letter has the wrong job title and I am not even from that team," responded one.

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[–] BalpeenHammer 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I can tell from first hand experience that the NZ health digital systems are atrocious. The reason is not incompetency (although that does play a large part) it's corruption. It's the way contracts are handed out for building and maintaining these systems.

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Just jumping in to add, lots of people think this is a Public Sector problem with IT procurement. But coming up to 20 year experience in IT for corps, its pretty much the same thing.

Lots of moaning about bespoke, or multiple systems interacting together, so instead lets buy an "off-the-shelf" solution because we did an 80/20 and we won't need to customise anything.

Oh whoops, turns out the 20 was the critical stuff and we now need some convoluted "fix" by our hugely expensive consultants' favoured implementation shop (oh weird, they share the same parent company?!) that gets 3/4 of the way through before budget is pulled and some stuff just never works. If you're lucky its left in the old system, sometimes you just lose features.

[–] absGeekNZ 4 points 2 weeks ago

Ah yes...the old "management has chosen SAP"

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