District Health Board (New Zealand)

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District Health Boards in New Zealand are health management units accountable to the Ministry of Health. These have existed since 1 January 2001 when the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000 came into force ^[1]. These units manage hospitals within their area and fund some primary care provisions.

1 History
2 Organisation
3 Locations
4 References
5 External link

[edit] History

District Health Boards were first introduced as an idea in the 1970s in the Green and White Paper suggested by the then in-power Labour government. This was part of a plan to nationalise primary health care as the Social Security Act of 1938 had originally intended. Labour subsequently lost the election to Rob Muldoon's National Party in the 1975 election. Muldoon's government chose however to slowly implement these reforms in trial "Area Health Boards", which later became the District Health Boards.

Following the neo-liberal "Big Bang" that occurred in the 1990s the DHBs were renamed "Regional Health Authorities" (RHA). These RHAs were amalgamated in 1997 to form the "Health Funding Authority". The election of the Labour-Alliance government in 1999 saw the return of DHBs in the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000.

[edit] Organisation

The District Health Boards are given a set of objectives by the Ministry of Health, but have a degree of autonomy in how they choose to achieve these. In contrast to their predecessors, the Regional Health Authorities, the DHBs are non-profit providers. The performance of individual DHBs is monitored by the DHB Funding and Performance Directorate. ^[2]

The DHBs are governed by boards, which consist of up to 11 members: seven elected by the public every three years, and up to four appointed by the Government's Minister of Health. ^[3] Voting for public-elected DHB board members occurs through the Single Transferable Vote system.