New Zealanders' deference to authority is exploited by the powerful to prevent workers gaining decent pay and conditions, trade union head Helen Kelly told an audience in Dunedin last night.
A decision announced yesterday to outsource the Otago Fertility Service (OFS) is a sign of the financial pressure on health boards, the head of the senior doctors' union says.
Anadarko looks set to be greeted by a protest flotilla when the Texas-based oil giant starts drilling a test well in deep water off the Otago coast early next year.
Rationale used to justify reducing bed numbers at the Southern District Health Board does not stack up and poses a clinical risk, a letter from the New Zealand Resident Doctors Association and aligned health unions to Southern District Health Board says.
Ideological opposition from midwives makes it difficult to instigate change to hospital practices to reduce the incidence of neonatal falls, a junior paediatrics trainee says.
Parents pay up to $89 for after-hours medical appointments for children aged 6-17 in some parts of New Zealand, delegates heard yesterday.
There are likely to be more deaths from antibiotic-resistant superbugs but a ''doomsday'' scenario is unlikely, University of Otago Webster Centre for Infectious Diseases director Prof Kurt Krause says.
Official figures showing only 13% of child head and neck injuries were intentional might reflect inadequate information recording, a University of Otago academic told delegates at the Paediatric Society of New Zealand's 65th annual scientific meeting in Dunedin yesterday.
Psychiatrists in New Zealand are ''wary'' of using the anaesthetic ketamine as an antidepressant because of publicity arising from a Health and Disability Commissioner investigation about its use in Dunedin, Prof Paul Glue says.
After months of delay, the Southern District Health Board will announce next week whether it will outsource its fertility service.
Type 1 diabetics are stigmatised by talk of an ''obesity epidemic'', a phrase that should be ''completely erased'', a type 1 sufferer told experts at a forum in Dunedin yesterday.
The United States is moving to ban artificial trans fats from food, but that ingredient legally does not even have to be labelled in New Zealand, University of Otago nutrition and diabetes authority Prof Jim Mann says.
The Public Service Association (PSA) says the Southern District Health Board plans more cuts to its already strained mental health service.
The former health board chairman sacked by Health Minister Tony Ryall a few years ago over the Michael Swann fraud has been told a return to a position of responsibility is still not ''politically acceptable''.
A small solution to a big problem was served up yesterday at a Port Chalmers cafe, where food is served in modest proportions.
High rates of locking mental health patients in seclusion at Southern District Health Board institutions have surprised the board, which says it cannot afford to hire more nurses to reduce its reliance on the practice.
The Southern District Health Board pitched a confidential plan to Counties Manukau DHB for it to employ Southern breast-screening radiologists, but was refused as the idea was deemed unsafe, documents released under the Official Information Act show.
The outspoken Dunedin Hospital doctor elected to the Southern District Health Board will soon understand how little money there is to spend, chairman Joe Butterfield told board members at their final meeting of the three-year term.
A key part of the oversight of compulsory treatment of mental health patients appears to fall short of acceptable standards for exercising such power, a new book on New Zealand's mental health law suggests.
Deferring some graduate nurse places, cutting bed numbers, and possibly reducing medical staff in a bid to save money is a sad legacy for the outgoing Southern District Health Board, senior doctors' union southern representative Dr John Chambers says.
