The cyber attack on the Waikato District Health Board (DHB) is "worse than COVID", says a top medical director, with the regional radiation system suffering a "catastrophic failure".
The DHB was hit by a monumental attack last week, causing an outage which affected services across the region's hospitals, forcing appointments and surgeries to be cancelled or postponed as clinicians were unable to access some computer services.
Cancer patients have been particularly affected, forced to travel to other centres to receive radiation therapy. It's unclear when all systems will be back up and running, but it isn't expected to be anytime soon.
Dr Chris Jackson, the medical director at the Cancer Society, told The AM Show that the attack "is worse than COVID" as while New Zealand prepared for the infectious virus to potentially overwhelm our hospitals, our measures implemented to stop the virus' spread stopped it before that happened. But in this case, hospital services have failed.
"This is worse than COVID. COVID we prepared for a disaster in terms of failure of our hospital services, and this has actually happened."
He doesn't believe any hospital system is ready for a complete failure.
"When you are in clinic, running a clinic, seeing patients, you have a list of who is coming through. Of course, you can't have that list because it is generated by a computer system. You want to access their medical records? That's on a computer system. You want to look at their old scans? That's all on a computer system."
Cancer patients were particularly caught out because of the complexity of the treatment, Dr Jackson said.
"Radiation therapy uses high-tech radiation beams, highly focussed specifically at the tumour. That requires complex 3-D planning and that is completely wiped out. You can't do any radiation treatment at all in the Waikato," he said.
"It is a catastrophic failure of the radiation system. You can't deliver any. The chemotherapy is still going ahead because we have some manual paper records which are still going on.
"But assessing patients, working out what their symptoms are, and if you have a cancer and you go to a doctor and they do a scan, they want to see how your cancer looks compared to the old one, at the moment, you can't do that."
He said there had been a "national pulling together" from different radiation centres since last week's attack.
"What has happened, immediately everyone has rolled their sleeves up and they have pitched in. Auckland has taken people for urgent treatment. Many people have gone to the private centre in Tauranga, have been shipped down there. People are being moved to Wellington shortly as well."
There has been some suggestion, including from National's Judith Collins, that cancer patients should be sent to Australia for treatment due to the limited spots in other New Zealand centres.
But Dr Jackson told The AM Show that should be a "last resort". He said the current COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne shows the risks of sending people to Australia.
"People are working evening shifts now around the country to take additional patients to stop that from happening."
He said moving patients also had a huge impact on families forced to relocate.
Health Minister Andrew Little told The AM Show on Thursday that experts from the GCSB's National Cyber Security Centre have warned officials that identifying those responsible will potentially take months.
The group claiming responsibility for the cyber attack emailed Newshub on Tuesday, saying they had obtained "a lot of personal info of employees and patients", as well as financial details.
They also declared "most" of the DHB's backups were deleted - and the systems can't be restored without their help.
Dr Jackson said it was a "vile and despicable" attack on New Zealand.
"The people who have done this are absolute scumbags and I hope they are caught and I hope they are punished to the fullest extent of the international law."
