DHBs shun tracing system
Bigger organisations prefer own platforms
Half of the country’s district health boards are not using the Government’s national contact tracing system for Covid-19 and experts are warning this could make it harder to control a future outbreak of the virus.
The 10 DHBs make up the four regional public health units that are not using the National Contact Tracing Solution (NCTS), including the country’s two biggest — Auckland and Wellington — as well as Christchurch and Northland.
The NCTS is a cloud-based platform that stores all case and contact details, linked by exposure events, allowing anyone accessing the system to see the status of a particular case.
Effective contact tracing is critical to keep on top of the disease as the country moves rapidly towards level 1 controls. The Government has poured $55 million into developing a national software solution touted as essential in achieving that goal.
While Northland and Christchurch said they would likely use it in the future, Auckland and Wellington appeared reluctant to use it at all.
Auckland Regional Public Health Service (ARPHS) said it had developed its own software to manage multiple notifiable diseases, including Covid-19.
“This customised platform has been continuously developed over the past 12 years,” it said in the statement.
While it was working with the Ministry of Health to determine how its system could work with the national platform, it noted the national software “is currently for use only with Covid-19, while ARPHS system is used to manage a wide range of notifiable diseases”.
Wellington’s Regional Public Health Unit issued a similar response.
“Our system was adapted to include a Covid-19 case investigation and contact management module, in addition to other notifiable diseases modules [for example measles and whooping cough].
“We’re working with the Ministry of Health to determine how our system will best interlink with the national system to ensure appropriate surge capacity, visibility of our local work at a central government level and connectedness with other public health units around the country.”
Director general of health Ashley Bloomfield told Morning Report that the DHBs brought onto the national system first were the ones without an electronic system.
He said he expected Northland DHB to come onto the system within the next few days.
Bloomfield said the large DHBs; Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch, already have systems that are sophisticated and interface with hospitals and primary care, so they need to make sure they’re not losing any of the functionality they’ve built up.
Epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the fragmented system was a symptom of the health sector in general.
“We’re seeing how it’s been eroded and fragmented over my entire working life in this system, which is over 30 years,” Baker said.
“The budgets have shrunk, the workforces shrunk hugely, capacities have not been maintained . . . everything has been wound down and we’ve seen terrible warning signs of this for a long time.”
Wellington’s Regional
Public Health Unit