SDHB

An animated video clip depicting the chief executive as a dancing Christmas elf has reportedly ''stunned'' some doctors at the Southern District Health Board.

The South will not be left behind by a new cancer treatment target, but there will be challenges in some areas, medical oncology clinical leader Dr Blair McLaren says.

Desperate Southern District Health Board sonographers worried public ultrasound services could become a thing of the past have voted to strike for five days later this month.

The troubled Southern District Health Board is reaching crisis point. Health reporter Eileen Goodwin examines its challenges ahead of the announcement on Monday of the new health minister.

Inevitably, the draft southern strategic health services plan will create unease in the South about whether it signals the long-feared downgrade of Dunedin Hospital.

Negotiations between the Southern District Health Board and South Link Health over their long-standing multimillion-dollar dispute have come to a standstill.

The South's breast-screening service may come to a ''standstill'' because the Southern District Health Board is refusing to honour mammographers' redundancies, the Association of Professionals and Executive Employees (Apex) says.

A Dunedin man's ''tragic death'' from a toxic overdose of rheumatoid arthritis medication could have been prevented if a pharmacist had picked up a doctor's prescribing mistake, a coroner has found.

Three and-a-half years after the Southern District Health Board called on the Ministry of Health to investigate its still unresolved multimillion-dollar dispute with South Link Health, trying to extract official information on it is more farce than fact-finding, Elspeth McLean opines.