Hospital systems suffer health lapses

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Eye patients suffered delays at Auckland City Hospital yesterday when part of its computer network crashed for four hours.

The morning breakdown was apparently a random failure, but it follows teething problems for the new hospital's high-tech computer and sterilisation systems that were designed to boost efficiency and save money.

Auckland District Health Board chief operating officer Marek Stepniak said a "network hub" information switching device serving the Wallace Block overheated and failed. It was replaced.

"We couldn't access Cris [the clinical records information system] or any other systems in the Wallace Block."

As part of the board's $30 million information systems upgrade, previous patients' paper records are scanned into a computer when they next come to hospital. For outpatients, doctors dictate new records into the system at a computer or by telephone and a typist transcribes them into the network. For inpatients, paper records are made and later scanned in.

X-rays and laboratory test results are also being handled electronically.

Mr Stepniak said that since yesterday's outage affected only one building, patients' records could be printed elsewhere and they were delivered to doctors before consultations.

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He said implementation of the new technology and the largely centralised $10 million instruments sterilisation service was going well.

Some doctors dispute this.

"There are major teething problems," said one specialist, who requested anonymity.

Another reported incidents of dirty surgical instruments and wrong instruments being delivered to operating theatres.

"They're all cooked and probably sterile, but it's a bit off-putting."

He said ear, nose and throat clinics had reduced their number of patients by a third because doctors were taking so much longer to look through some of the larger patient files on computers. Some found it much harder to locate the pages because there were fewer visual cues like different coloured pages.

Mr Stepniak said the worst affected clinics were seeing a quarter fewer patients for this reason and the change had increased the size of the waiting list in ophthalmology.

Staff were being offered comprehensive training, including tuition during patient consultations if necessary.

The problem should decline as doctors summarised patients' medical histories at their first visit after the upgrading, reducing the need to go through back files.

He said Starship children's hospital had temporarily stopped using the new, centralised sterile supply until better ways of passing on its surgeons' daily equipment requests could be implemented.

But there had been no increase in the "very, very small number" of dirty instruments - which was no more than at other hospitals - arriving at theatres.