The new Southern District Health Board will have a more streamlined committee process than its predecessors.
It will have two advisory committees instead of three and one meeting day instead of two.
The two advisory committees will be chaired by board chairman Errol Millar and his deputy Paul Menzies.
Mr Millar, who was chairman of the previous Otago and Southland boards' combined community and public health advisory committee, will chair a new eight-person committee which also takes on the role of disability support.
The previous combined disability support committee was chaired by Southlander Neville Cook.
Mr Menzies will chair the hospital advisory committee, expected to have 11 members.
Mr Millar said Mr Menzies was already familiar with Otago hospital issues because he had earlier served as a Southland representative on Otago's advisory committee.
Each of the previous boards had its own hospital advisory committee.
Otago's was chaired by former board chairman Richard Thomson and Southland's by Tim Ward, who took on that job this year after Katie O'Connor stood down.
Mr Millar said membership of the committees would be announced soon, when it was finalised.
The advisory committees will alternate their meetings between Dunedin and Invercargill.
The board meetings also follow that process and Mr Millar said the plan was that the monthly committee meetings would be in a different centre from that month's board meeting.
For instance, if the board meeting was in Invercargill, the committee meetings would be in Dunedin.
This month the board is holding behind-closed-doors workshops, rather than meetings, for the committees in Dunedin.
The board also has a six-person audit, risk and finance committee which will continue to be chaired by Susie Johnstone, the former deputy on both boards, and will meet the day before each board meeting.
Plans for the new iwi governance committee have not yet been settled, but Mr Millar said good progress had been made. elspeth.mclean@odt.co.nz
