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

submitted 1 week 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 0 points 1 week ago

There are roughly five million people in NZ. If each person had ten interactions with the health system every year that's only fifty million records per year in a database. I have built systems that process fifty million records per year on an off the shelf postgres database using a slow interpreted language.

There is no excuse for NZ to not have a centralized medical records system. There is no excuse for a centralized medical/hospital management system. This should have been done years ago. Right now there are open source medical systems being used by countries which are bigger than NZ with more complex health and social challenges. NZ could take one of those systems, hire ten engineers to tweak and customize it and deploy them on a half a rack without too much trouble.

Hell give me a couple of hundred thousand dollar contract and I will put it together and hire all the engineers for you.