25 Feb 2014

Hospital's IT system feeling better

10:28 pm on 25 February 2014

An IT outage at Dunedin Hospital caused significant problems, the Southern District Health Board says.

Dunedin Hospital.

Photo: RNZ

The DHB says for reasons that remain unclear, its main computer server rebooted itself at 1am on Monday, forcing some patients to have to go home and retrieve paper records.

The board's medical director of patient services, Richard Bunton, said the crash caused major delays and admissions were held up.

However, Dr Bunton said the hospital was still able to treat patients effectively. He said at no time was any patient's life in danger and all information was backed up and is safe.

Dr Bunton said he wants urgent answers as to why the computer system in one of New Zealand's major hospitals failed.

All elective surgery was expected to go ahead as normal on Tuesday.