A health advisory group is to be established as part of the Southern Primary Health Organisation to improve links between community and hospital health care, funding and finance general manager Robert Mackway-Jones told this week's community and public health advisory meeting in Invercargill.
A Southern District Health Board member is questioning Southland's reported high rate of suicide.
More DHB resources should be allocated to speed up plans to reorganise elderly community care, Southern District Health Board chief executive Brian Rousseau said this week.
Southern Primary Health Organisation has taken issue with a statement that it could have applied to use leftover funds for health services.
Influenza-like illness has picked up in the South in the past two weeks, but the swine flu strain appeared to have "done its dash", Public Health South service manager Stephen Jenkins told a Southern District Health Board committee yesterday.
The former Well Dunedin PHO has more than $720,000 to distribute for health projects.
A Dunedin baby had made a "full recovery" from meningococcal disease in Dunedin Hospital and was back at home, Public Health South medical officer of health Dr Marion Poore said.
A GP skin lesion surgery service will possibly not meet demand because of funding restrictions, Southern Primary Health Organisation chief executive Ian Macara says.
Dunedin Hospital children's ward patient Ben Fox (3), with mother Jo Fox, of Cromwell, and registered nurse Marilyn Hanson (right), show off an electric bed bought last year with money raised by Countdown staff, who were at the hospital yesterday to launch this year's Countdown Kids Hospital Appeal.
The gap between the rich and poor was halted under the Labour Government but is growing again, with serious consequences for the nation's long-term health, Labour's health spokesman, Grant Robertson, told GPs at a medical conference in Dunedin yesterday.
This 6-month-old male albatross, at 13kg the biggest of this year's chicks, was the centre of attention yesterday when Conservation Minister, Kate Wilkinson (left) and National list MP, Michael Woodhouse (right), visited the royal albatross colony.
Otago Peninsula Trust administrator Jo Harvey with a broken gnome used to welcome children to Glenfalloch's annual gnome hunt.
A Dunedin woman who left a job looking after an autistic man because she felt unsafe says the Ministry of Health needs to change the way it dishes out money to families who directly employ carers.
Society should ask if it is fair childhood poverty rates far outstrip those of the elderly, says University of Otago Prof Barry Taylor, a distinguished child health researcher.
Dunedin's Mornington Health Centre is in talks to buy an adjacent section as it considers expanding and taking over services offered by Southern District Health Board.
Snow prompted the Southern District Health Board to cancel Meals on Wheels in Dunedin yesterday for the first time Wendy Patterson could recall in the 28 years she had been helping the service.
Stained glass window artist Peter Mackenzie trims some of the stained glass panels he has made for the refurbishment of William Larnach's tomb in Dunedin's Northern Cemetery.
Kiwi jobs will not keep disappearing overseas if Labour gains power, party leader Phil Goff said in Dunedin last night.
A rail and Maritime Transport Union delegate at Hillside has likened rail workers being told they had lost their job yesterday to "plucking sheep out of a herd".
Being required to drop "tobacconist" from his business's long-standing display name is ridiculous, Dunedin's Selwyn Grave says.
