Before I do anything else, I would like to ask that when you read my post please treat it with as much impartiality as you can. It is a genuine “how can we make this better?” and not a rant, and certainly not intended as an insult in any way.
I am referring to the annual HealthAlliance cessation of release-type work for a month between mid-December and mid-January. I respect the right of every worker to a holiday. However, HA supports the 24/7 world of acute medicine and the problem of the status quo is that everything IT-related (at least in my DHB and probably at least two others) grinds to a halt.
It is no secret to anyone on this network that most of the health IT projects and processes take months of continuous painstaking work to get right and involve many professionals. It’s relay-style work where things are handed off and passed on and picked up again. Our patients cannot afford one month of interruption on that scale.
I guess what I am asking is for collective wisdom from the network for ways of NOT having such a shutdown. If we put “health” anywhere in the name of an organisation, then surely an appreciation of the 24/7 nature of health (or lack thereof) should be part of that organisation’s ethos. However, if you feel strongly that a shutdown for a month is absolutely necessary, then please also post your view here.
I’m sorry Era, but you are fighting human nature with this one.
IT stuff at my Trust (Birmingham) completely shuts down over August in much the same way. On the plus, I found that it was a brilliant opportunity to access those staff that remain who are ordinarily extremely busy (such as the CIO, CEO, Director of Innovation, etc etc) as most of their meetings are not on.
So I advise you to accept it and see how you can take advantage of it.
Hah, @NathanK, the problem here is that the advantage you have does not exist - every man and his dog goes on holiday during the shutdown. and related services, even if they are not on leave themselves, claim inability to do anything during the shutdown. Officially it’s only a change freeze, but actually we can’t get anything else done either without a LOT of escalation
In short, I am not sure I want to accept it - health is 24/7, ergo health IT support should also be 24/7 … can you imagine if all theatre staff went on leave for a month in December? … exactly.
Hi Era I completely agree with you and it is extremely difficult.
In my experience the shut down is even wider on either side because of the ‘cooling down’ and ‘warming up’ periods, where projects start winding down in the month before shutdown and often no decisions can be made in Jan/Feb because a number of key stakeholders/team members are still away.
I do see Nathan’s point about grabbing the occasional person who is freed up as a result but that is quite opportunistic and depends on the individual, usually everyone is snowed under and just trying to finish everything before year end and mentally blocking out everything else.
In terms of solutions - I think Northern Region ISSP and LTIP is the place to take this (more clinicians always welcome), there is a workstream that focuses on future proofing workforce development, resiliency, capability and I think the lack of dedicated IT resource and personnel is definitely a weakness that the region needs to address, otherwise we may as well go back to paper.
Theatre staff do tend to down tools (except for emergency work) over Christmas and New Year - and often beyond. But not to quite the degree of IT to be fair. Good luck.
Yeah, forget about getting anyone in the weeks before Christmas. It is the quite patch afterwards that can be fruitful.
I agree with Brian that the cool down and warm up period generally means that in December and January nothing is going on apart from break fix. I can understand a change freeze over this time in production environments but this is because we have tacitly agreed that everyone can take holidays. It is more of a chicken and egg situation than an official IT shuts down at this point. it can be quite destructive when we must have clinical change freeze over winter periods due to winter pressures, as this take the year down to 8 months instead of 12. So how do we challenge this culture? Is some of this driven by vendor behaviour as well as IT department behaviour?
That’s interesting, @john.hewitt, I always thought it was the IT department as my interaction is primarily with them rather than vendors. Surely it’s also a bit of NZ summer “thing” remnant? I recall when I first came to NZ (over 20years ago) Auckland city would be literally shut down over Christmas for about 6 weeks. Certainly not the case now, but still exists in some sectors for a shorter period.
The fact that the end result of it (+ winter issues) is the. reduction of working year by 4months is concerning.
How to change it? Not sure, but getting some info re: whether IT staff themselves are happy with the current “enforced” holiday situation might be interesting. I can see some negatives for them: it impacts their ability to take leave at other times of the year, possibly adds work before and after, travel/holidays are more expensive at that time, there are bound to be other things (not everyone celebrates Christmas, etc). Whether the negatives outweigh the positives and what proportion of staff would like to change the current culture, would be a starting point.
