SDHB

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.

Lives are saved every day at Dunedin Hospital. But are the surgeons' scalpels being blunted by a lack of help at home afterwards, or are community expectations too high? Nigel Benson and Eileen Goodwin report.

The Southern District Health Board has rejigged top staff to allow two senior executives to focus solely on cost reduction.

A single incorrect digit entered into a computer system caused the massive IT crash in southern hospitals in February, a report from the Southern District Health Board says.