Health board amalgamation

As a recipient of health services in this region and a student of health policy manoeuvres, I am interested in the amalgamation of the Otago and Southland DHBs. 
 
The World Health Organisation is now advocating for mandatory impact evaluation to ensure that public policy decisions (particularly in health) work in the direction of improving, rather than inhibiting better health outcomes.

Often changes start with the best of intentions and then backfire in unexpected ways. Transparent evaluations allow rapid identification of unforeseen problems and assure resolution in a planned way.

So far, I have not heard mention of such an evaluation for this amalgamation.

The questions that health policy evaluation addresses are quite simple and of interest to us all: what is the change? (we know the answer to this one - amalgamation); why exactly is the change happening?; what does the change hope to achieve?; how will you/we know if this is achieved?

And then the final one: what will happen if the change fails to achieve what it planned to achieve - i.e. what's the Plan B?

In the UK they add a further question that we might also consider: what is the implication of this change for patient safety?

I'm sure that the Otago and Southland DHBs have answers to these questions. I would be interested to hear them.