Error blitzes health records

Thousands of hours of work by health board employees have been wiped in a computer glitch.

Years of work belonging to 690 staff at Waikato District Health Board has vanished after a major computer error at Waikato Hospital.

The lost data, which includes countless emails and personal work files, was information that was backed-up in the hospital's storage area network. The hospital is spending at least $60,000 trying to retrieve the information and has hired experts in the US.

A Waikato Hospital doctor who did not want to be named, said the damage to him alone was huge.

"Overall you're looking at thousands and thousands of hours of work of reports, letters, communications, teaching material, guidelines. There's no patient records; it's nothing anybody will die from but it's all the stuff that I do in my non-clinical, my own, time, in terms of educating myself and my junior doctors and nurses."

The doctor said he had lost all his legal records and associated workings which he needed for court cases, and all communications, clippings and minutes from executive meetings, while other doctors had lost work towards graduate diplomas.

"It will take a long time to re-coup that work."

While he said minor amounts were retrievable in hard copy form, most of it was not.

"It's just a massive inconvenience. It's like your home computer just getting completely wiped."

He said he was frustrated there appeared to be no full-proof back-up system.

"It's outrageous that this has occurred."

It's not clear what caused two disks in the storage area to fail on Sunday, October 21, or whether the resulting damage was due to computer or human error.

Waikato District Health chief executive Craig Climo said he believed contributing factors taken as a whole were likely to have led to the problem.