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Health NZ staff face second email address change within months

By Rowan Quinn of RNZ Health NZ / Te Whatu Ora is ditching its current Māori-language email address, even though thousands of staff have only used it for a few months. The organisation was still switching many of its 90,000 workers to its main email domain tewhatuora.govt.nz, a process that began three years ago. In October, they must move again to the new domain, healthnz.govt.nz. Health NZ said the change was to emphasise its English name, but IT processes required all staff had to move to the Māori address first. A union described it as a waste of money needed elsewhere in health. The change added a major step to the already complex process of creating combined IT systems for Health NZ, which was created from 20 district health boards in 2022, each with their own systems and email domain names. Health NZ chief information technology officer Darren Douglass noted that, when the merger project started, the organisation was called Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand. “More recently, we have emphasised the English name to provide a clearer, single national identity,” he said. The Government’s 2023 coalition agreement included a policy that all public service organisations had their primary name in English, unless they specifically related to Māori. Before that, Health NZ had primarily been known as Te Whatu Ora. Douglass said it was not possible to separate out the cost of the additional move to healthnz.govt.nz. “It is just one part of many other changes – network access, hosting, application access, security etc – that need to be co-ordinated, which explains why it is taking time,” he said. Middlemore Hospital. Photo / LDR, Jarred Williamson The Public Service Association, which represents IT workers, said changing domain names twice was a “huge exercise” and a waste of money. PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said it would do nothing to improve patient care, which should be Health NZ’s main focus. “At the end of the day, there’s no one sitting in our overwhelmed emergency departments, especially in the busy winter season, who would be reassured by the fact that all the health workers around them have email addresses in English, rather than te reo Māori.” The change to the tewhatuora.govt.nz emails had already disrupted health teams – and that would happen when the domain name changed again in October, she said. “Clinicians have had to use time-consuming workarounds, they’re had to raise tickets with the IT helpdesk. These people have more important work to do.” George Smith, from Health NZ’s digital team, said it had the capabilities and resources in place to deliver the work. For those already using the tewhatuora.govt.nz domain, the change to the healthnz domain would be a simple alias change, he said. “For others – the majority of our staff – it coincides with the necessary upgrade and migration from older ex-district systems that are reaching the end of their supported life,” he said. “This work is required regardless, to ensure systems remain secure, reliable and fit for purpose.” Wait times for health staff to get support from the IT team had stabilised and were close to target levels, he said. Some hospitals – including Auckland and Middlemore – had only moved from their old district health board addresses to tewhatuora in the past three months. Douglass said most users couldn’t move directly from their old DHB addresses to healthnz.govt.nz – they had to go to tewhatuora.govt.nz first. In large part, that was because the change was part of a much wider project to integrate the organisation’s IT systems, including network access, hosting, application access and security. The work had to be done carefully and step by step to make sure clinical systems were not disrupted, he said. “Staff are being upgraded from their former district systems into a single Health NZ Microsoft environment through a number of linked steps to ensure each staff member can access relevant clinical and administrative functions with the...