Lees, the district health board’s director of nursing and midwifery, has been Incident Controller since a fire early on Monday in the DHB’s main computer server at Rotorua Hospital caused a major outage affecting computer and patient management systems, along with email and internet access.
He said staff had been trying to restore systems, following clearing up after the fire, but had then faced further delays as issues with temperature control, air quality and humidity also needed to be sorted.
“We are being cautious as we don’t want to cause further damage to our servers,” he said. “These latest issues have likely added several more days to the first step of restoring the network, but these setbacks have shown us that there are lots of unknowns in the process. We still do not have a concrete time for having our systems back up and running.”
Rotorua and Taupo Hospitals and the DHB’s community services are all affected by the outage.
Lees said the DHB has received lots of help from neighbouring DHBs, service providers and primary care and was really grateful for the level of support.
He is reminding people to expect delays when they come to Rotorua or Taupo Hospital, as assessing and treating patients can take longer without electronic access to records.
Patients with scheduled elective surgery or outpatient appointments are being told to turn up as usual. If appointments need to be cancelled the DHB would contact people directly.
