By RNZ

• Health New Zealand plans to cut nearly half its data and digital positions, over 1000 roles.
• The Public Service Association called the ‘fail early, fail often’ strategy ‘astonishing, shocking and unacceptable’.
• Feedback from staff expressed fear and concern, with the PSA requesting an urgent privacy investigation.

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.

The central health agency has proposed to cut almost half its data and digital positions – more than 1000 of them.

The “fail early” strategy was outlined in an hour-long online video in December by Health NZ chief clinical informatics officer Dr Lara Hopley.

The Public Service Association (PSA) called it “astonishing, shocking and unacceptable”.

The reset will cut or pause more than 100 projects.

In more than 100 pages of internal feedback leaked to RNZ, one staffer said: “I am developing a software solution to scrape the test from a paper maternity booking form and automatically load the data ... I found out yesterday that my position is proposed to be disestablished. Go figure! This is the kind of innovation Health NZ needs!”

The feedback contained scores of hugely detailed, worried responses from the front line and one-liner expressions of alarm.

“Our systems fail weekly and are kept alive by local IT responding at pace to an urgent phone call. Remove them and their expertise and patient harm will ensue,” wrote another staffer.

Hopley talked in the video on December 4 about having to save $99 million from data and digital, while facing the prospect of “further under-resourcing”.

She then stated the No 1 problem was waste. The solution included to “fanatically minimise waste” and to fail often.

“Failing often and failing early is the way to succeed ... failing early is a sign of success in and of itself,” Hopley told staff.

It had echoes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto “move fast and break things” that many tech entrepreneurs adopted, only to get pushback from a wary public.

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.”

Hopley said other ways to cut waste were to have one team per function and “one vanilla-flavoured brown-bag common cheap solution per problem … obviously, after a good discussion and making sure it is actually safe”.

This was in line with a recent government initiative for agencies to stop developing expensive bespoke IT systems and buy off the shelf.

Hopley said Health NZ had to listen to the front line and “drive out fear”.

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

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

“Without us the problems will go around and around in circles,” said a member of the clinical system to support functional specialists, who appeared all slated to go.

The PSA has asked the Privacy Commissioner to urgently investigate the proposed cuts.

Feedback on the proposal closed at the end of January.

“We will now take time to carefully consider all feedback before any final decisions are made,” Health NZ said.