The not-so-merry-go-round of trying to get info from Health NZ

Saturday, 15 March 2025

I asked for summaries of serious adverse events. They said they didn't exist. So I asked for the full reports. They gave me summaries.

Serious errors in the health system are of public interest, but getting the information from health authorities is a painful process, Nikki Macdonald writes.

OPINION: First, I asked for summaries of serious and fatal mistakes in the health system. Health NZ took six months to tell me they didn’t exist.

So then, I asked for the full anonymised incident reports. Pick a region, they said, because we can’t do that nationwide. I picked Wellington.

Three months later, they responded. By sending summaries.

All this for information that used to be published annually for anyone to read.

From 2008, health authorities published summaries of preventable serious adverse events by region. That includes the most major incidents, such as the unexpected deaths of babies and suspected suicides in hospital mental health wards.

That annual report resulted from a 2007 ruling by then Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem (following a complaint from The Post ) that the information was in the public interest.

Way back in 2007 then chief ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem ruled Wellington's health board had to release details of serious mishaps.

“Serious and sentinel events are a class of incidents in the public health system where something has gone seriously wrong. When one of these incidents happens, there is a public interest in knowing, in general terms at least, what went wrong and what measures will be taken to prevent it happening again,' Wakem wrote.

But the summaries were quietly discontinued, as part of a revamp of the national policy for reporting on adverse events. They were replaced by quarterly data dashboards, which list only the broad category of problem such as medication error, fall.

But serious errors in the health system still happen, and are still of public interest.

So in May 2024, The Post again requested summaries of all the serious adverse events in the health system during 2023.

Six months later, Health NZ OIA manager Danielle Coe advised that they could not provide the summaries, because they didn’t exist.

“In addition to having no mandate to produce summaries of adverse events for public release, they are not something Health NZ has the dedicated organisational capacity to produce,” Coe said.

Health NZ does, however, still submit anonymised versions of the full incident reviews to the Health, Quality and Safety Commission (HQSC).

HQSC clinical director Martin Thomas previously told The Post that the new reporting policy focused on “healing, learning and improving from harm”, and they stopped publishing summaries of individual incidents because it could discourage reporting when things went wrong.

But clearly not everyone agrees. Because when The Post asked instead for full anonymised serious event reports from the Wellington, Hutt Valley and Wairarapa regions, Health NZ replied ‒ three months later ‒ with the summaries they previously said did not exist.

Coe apologised for the “confusion” and said that, while summaries were no longer routinely produced at a national level, the greater Wellington region was still reporting them.