IT failures leave Hutt Hospital nurses underpaid, fuelling political blame game over health system digital cuts

A payroll system fault at Hutt Hospital left more than a thousand nurses underpaid in their most recent pay run, prompting concern among staff already grappling with wider IT disruptions across the public health system.

A delegate for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation said the issue emerged midweek, when nurses noticed their pay packets were lower than expected but were unable to confirm the discrepancy because the payroll system was offline. The outage, which began on Wednesday, meant staff could not access payslips or verify whether they had been paid correctly.

“At the moment it’s hard to know, because we can’t access our payroll system,” the delegate said. “We couldn’t access our payslips, which was a bit of a worry, so we don’t know how much we’ve been underpaid or what discrepancies there may be.”

Some nurses reported they may have received up to NZ$1000 less than they were owed for the fortnight, according to anecdotal accounts shared with union representatives. The delegate said the uncertainty had been a “real concern” for members, particularly those with fixed financial commitments such as rent or mortgages.

An internal email sent by the Hutt Valley payroll team to staff on Friday afternoon and seen said approximately 1132 nursing staff were affected by an issue with PAYE calculations. The underpayments varied in amount, the email said, but the cause had been identified and fixed.

“We are currently preparing to bank all underpayments to employees today,” the email said, adding that the organisation apologised for the error. Staff who incurred penalties because of missed or delayed payments were encouraged to contact payroll for support, with requests to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Health New Zealand, which oversees the country’s public health system, confirmed the problem had been resolved. However, the union delegate urged affected nurses to proactively contact landlords or banks to explain the situation was beyond their control, in the hope of avoiding late fees or other penalties.

“Hopefully people won’t suffer any adverse financial hardship as a result of this,” the delegate said, adding that a supplementary pay run might be required to fully rectify the issue.

The payroll problem comes amid broader concern about the resilience of Health New Zealand’s IT systems. In April, the agency confirmed it would cut around a third of its IT roles, and media reports have since said a consultancy firm was contracted to fill gaps on service desks until the end of January. The delegate questioned whether restructuring and staff reductions may have contributed to recent outages.

“The government talks about getting rid of back-office people,” the delegate said. “But it’s these back-office people that are vital to keeping the frontline going. Without them, we’re really stuck.”

RNZ understands a similar payroll issue in the Tairāwhiti region was narrowly avoided earlier this week after being resolved in time. In that case, staff were initially told on Wednesday morning that a server issue meant pay would be delayed, before being advised later that day that the problem had been fixed.

The underpayment incident at Hutt Hospital follows other recent technology failures. Health New Zealand earlier confirmed a major outage at Capital and Coast that affected a range of clinical and administrative systems, while Southern hospitals experienced an outage that prevented clinicians from accessing applications for medication dosages, lab results and patient notes.

Health Minister Simeon Brown said doctors, nurses and patients deserved reliable IT systems and had asked Health New Zealand to urgently resolve the problems. Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall accused the government of taking a “lax” approach to health IT, arguing that staff cuts were putting patients at risk.

Brown’s office responded that Health New Zealand was dealing with significant legacy issues inherited from earlier reforms, describing the digital environment as “complex and fragile” and pointing to a newly announced Health Digital Investment Plan aimed at stabilising and modernising systems nationwide.