Griffin on Tech: The health IT Hunger Games, Aussie’s social media experiment
A bomb is set to go off in the health IT workforce. It’s been ticking for months.
Several contacts of mine who survived previous purges at Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora, now expect to endure what one described as a “Hunger Games” process, with the organisation proposing to cut 1120 from digital services, a 47% reduction from the current workforce of 2405 positions.
According to Health NZ’s change document that media outlets have been quoting from, the new baseline of full-time equivalent (FTE) roles is 1285, with 822 of them new roles that existing staff will be invited to apply for.
At a time when there is a huge amount of work to be done to get the health IT house in order and just as we need to lean on technology to improve efficiency and develop new ways of delivering healthcare, in-house capability in Health NZ is set to be significantly reduced.
“When you remove vacancies from the numbers, the total proposed job cuts of those currently employed into roles is 37 per cent: that is 37 per cent of us who turned up to work today to be told we have no place in the proposed structure. We were also told to expect to do more with less,” a Health NZ staffer told eHealthNews.
Contractor bills mount
It comes as the use of contractors and consultants by the agency ramps up. Credit once again goes to RNZ’s Phil Pennington and his skilful OIA work extracting some of the details on what is going on with health IT and the $72 million spent on contracts and consultants working on the agency’s over-budget and behind-schedule health payments system.
If the plan is to lean on IT contractors and consulting firms to a greater degree because Health NZ lacks the in-house capability to get digital projects done, that would be understandable. But the health sector’s track record when it comes to outsourced IT projects is not flash.
If the plan is to radically reimagine how digital and data infrastructure and services are managed at Health NZ, admittedly, that’s what most people I know working in the agency claim needs to happen.
As the Health NZ change document notes: “Strategically, there is a need to move to fewer, better digital platforms—ideally national platforms—which can be more easily and cost-effectively maintained, protected, and extended.”
Yes to that. But in the process outlined, Health NZ is set to slash its internal capability in all things digital. Forget innovation in digital health service delivery. Forget adequate support of the clinical health workforce to help them embrace digital platforms.
The data and digital budget for 2024/25 will be cut from $816 million to $658 million. It’s the usual story of the government at the moment - do more with less. The consultation on the proposal closing on December 18 with a decision due in late January will leave many health IT workers in limbo over the summer break and a big question mark over the ability of Health NZ to deliver on its digital and data strategy with a significantly reduced workforce.
The kids are not alright
So Australia did it. The country became the first in the world to pass legislation banning under 16s from accessing social media platforms. The process by which it went about doing this - with just 24 hours for public consultation and pushing the bill through in the last week of Parliament sitting, has been widely condemned by everyone, except the major parties who have given it their support.
Australia will go to the polls on or before May 17 and the parties see the social media ban as playing well with voters. The problem is that with both the Labor Party and the Coalition opposition parties in lockstep on the legislation, there’s nothing to differentiate them. It won’t actually come into play as an election issue.
The opposition missed an opportunity to pursue a more nuanced alternative to the blunt force approach taken by Anthony Albanese’s government. Now Australia faces the very difficult task of figuring out how exactly it is going to make the social media ban work in practice.
Parents face the prospect of having to get their kids to delete Youtube, Reddit and TikTok from their phones. There’s no doubt that these platforms deliver a dopamine rush that sees many youths sucked into a black hole, glued to their screens, disengaged from home life. But social media offers connection and support to many more. Australia is now going to tell digital natives they are not allowed to congregate in the places where they found connection and support.
Prohibition never works. The kids will find workarounds and I suspect many parents will roll their eyes at the law and let their kids use social media. I just hope we avoid this unworkable approach here and tackle the real problem - the insidious algorithms and business models that drive these platforms and which have numerous dark consequences for adults and kids alike.
Photo credit: Günter Valda/Unsplash
