A stop-work meeting this morning demanded a review of workplace health and safety at the Implementation Authority, as workers aired their grievances.
About 100 Health Service Union members on the Single Digital Patient Record Implementation Authority staff met in a stop-work meeting this morning to air grievances against the organisation’s senior management as the SDPR rollout stutters on.
As reported by The Medical Republic‘s sister publication HSD this morning, employees have been concerned that staff at the middle management and analyst levels of the SDPRIA were burning out from “overwork, non-stop pressure from the executive, unrealistic demands and deadlines, constant meetings, the endless barrage of emails requesting more and more output, poor/delayed staff comms, constant issues with pay, sudden changes in direction and urgent requests to complete last-minute activities that require many, many more team members”.
The SDPRIA is due to roll out the Epic single digital patient record at the Hunter New England Local Health District on Wednesday, after a period of delays that saw the original timetable of March abandoned in favour of 20 May and then delayed for a further week.
TMR was told one employee had suffered a severe medical emergency recently that they could only attribute to stress from working on the Epic rollout.
Others, said our source, confirmed that hundreds of workers from other LHDs have been shipped in to the HNELHD to support SDPRIA staff on the ground, and in fact, that call out had now widened interstate to both Victoria and the ACT.
An anonymous source inside the SDPRIA told TMR that during an earlier management meeting at 8am, the organisation’s CEO, Dr Teresa Anderson, had told middle managers that staff resourcing had increased and that they “must not know where they are and who they are”.
The source advised TMR that any extra resources that the CEO was referring to were not the type that were needed to build and configure the system.
In the stop-work meeting, TMR was told, several employees denied that staff numbers had been increased and in fact demands on staff had “only increased”.
Digital health analysts were being asked to cover the go-live, business as usual, new tranche configuration and ongoing training support, TMR understands.
Several employees expressed fears about making mistakes with configuration and the consequences of that.
According to TMR’s source, employees had manned a “bridge line” for several hours straight, without any cover for meal or toilet breaks. A bridge line is a live Microsoft Teams meeting that’s open 7am-10pm in which clinicians can drop in and ask specific questions.
When concerns were raised about needing coverage TMR’s source said they were told to take their phone with them.
By the end of the stop-work meeting the employees and HSU representatives had a list of demands for the SDPRIA senior executive team:
- an independent review of work health and safety at SDPRIA;
- a full workforce review to ensure appropriate staffing levels;
- election of a health and safety representative and the establishment of a safety committee;
- implementation of a system to track actual hours worked;
- immediate advertisement of all known vacancies; and
- all temporary fulltime employees to be converted to permanent employees.
A spokesperson for the SDPRIA promised TMR a response to the workers’ concerns by our publication deadline, but none was forthcoming.
TMR also contacted the NSW minister for health Ryan Park’s office for comment, but again, nothing was forthcoming by deadline.
Secretary of health Susan Pearce was also contacted for comment, but none was forthcoming.
“Everyone is exhausted, many people have burst into tears in the office, and the stern words of the CEO [Dr Teresa Anderson] in management meetings to the managers, who work extremely long hours, are wearing them down to the point of hopelessness,” said TMR’s source inside the authority, before the stop-work meeting.
“Nobody can see how this toxic culture, this pressure and the significant disorganisation will end.”
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SDPRIA staff were told by the executive that between go-live periods the statewide service desk would take the load of the calls that came through for assistance, in order to give SDPRIA staff a break from a 24/7 roster.
“But the SWSD staff haven’t been trained appropriately and do not know how to correctly direct an SDPRIA request, so they just call anyone and everyone who could possibly help,” said TMR’s source.
“It’s chaos now and will be worse during the HNE go-live.”
The insider said that when staff raised concerns about staff shortages, broken processes and overwhelmed workers they were told, “this is the nature of a program like this” and “they knew what they signed up for”.
In addition to not having enough staff, “mass resignations” have left gaps in teams which can’t meet deadlines unless they overwork, often doing overtime without pay.
“We wanted to say collectively that we cannot keep going like this, it is enough,” said TMR’s source.
“Enough with the never-ending pressure from the executive to produce more with less, enough with the unrealistic expectations, enough of the last-minute changes and requests for staff who are already drowning in tasks, enough with the overwork due to under resourced teams.
“Enough with being treated with disrespect for wanting our employee rights to be upheld and our personal lives to be considered when it comes to rostering and providing support during go-live.”
TMR’s source said more resignations “of great talent” and “another delayed go-live” would be the result if conditions did not improve.
Tranche B sites for the rollout – at the moment designated for Northern NSW LHD, Mid North Coast LHD, Northern Sydney LHD, Central Coast LHD and LIMS North – were “extremely behind” on preparations.
“All we want is a culture that supports and enables staff who are building and implementing this eMR for the state,” said TMR’s source.
SDPRIA employees want the executive of the SDPRIA and NSW Health to “show competent leadership” by:
- improving long-term planning for each tranche, including logical, prospective planning for go-live periods;
- hiring significantly more staff in line with this planning; and
- clear and consistent performance expectations should apply across all levels of staff to ensure workloads and responsibilities are distributed fairly. Where expected outcomes are not being met, this can place additional pressure on other team members and contribute to unsustainable workloads for analysts who are consistently delivering strong results.
“The organisation structure and operational model is antiquated, regressive and broken, failing to support the teams in sustainable ways that allow them to complete a reasonable number of tasks and deliver required, quality outcomes in an eight-hour day,” said TMR’s source.
