The Public Service Association (PSA) is calling on Health NZ to conduct an urgent review after a failure in its payroll system left around 4,000 Waikato hospital and health workers without pay yesterday.
The union says the payroll glitch affected around half of the Waikato health workforce.
“Workers turned up and did their jobs, caring for patients, keeping hospitals running, and they deserved to be paid on time. A payroll failure of this scale is not a minor inconvenience, it causes real hardship,” said PSA National Secretary, Fleur Fitzsimons.
Health NZ has apologised to staff and said the failure was a result of “an error in the rostering system used to calculate pays”, with staff expected to be paid tonight.
“Apologies are not enough; Health NZ must urgently get to the bottom of what happened here and make sure it never happens again. What we do know is the Government’s spending cuts and axing of health workers do not help,” said Ms Fitzsimons.
“This is not an isolated incident. IT failures have become a recurring feature of our public health system and that is no accident. Just last week a critical medical imaging system was down for two hours across Auckland and Northland hospitals delaying results for clinicians.
“The PSA has repeatedly warned that cuts to Health New Zealand’s Digital Services workforce would make IT failures more likely and harder to fix.”
The Association is calling on Health Minister, Simeon Brown and Health NZ to urgently review the state of the health system’s digital infrastructure and to halt further cuts to the Digital Services workforce until a full and independent assessment of IT risk has been completed.
“Workers and patients cannot afford for the Government to keep ignoring the warning signs. It’s time for the Health Minister to act,” said Fitzsimons.
