Hawke’s Bay DHB is now operating under Alert Level 2 COVID-19 guidelines, which came into force at 6am this morning ( 28 February).

Under Alert Level 2 surgery and outpatient appointments will go ahead as planned, but the DHB’s Alert level 2 visitor policy is now in place.

As announced by the Director-General of Health this evening, a further person in the household of Case M has returned a positive result.

The latest case, known as Case N, is currently asymptomatic.

The Ministry of Health has this afternoon been notified of a positive case.

The case, known as Case M, is an older sibling of a Papatoetoe High School student who was a casual plus contact. The student had returned 3 recent negative tests and is asymptomatic.

Membership of New Zealand’s largest health insurer is at its highest in more than a decade.

Southern Cross Health Society’s membership grew to 881,345 New Zealanders on 31 January 2021, up 6,000 from January 2020.

The Rata ‘Influence of 8’ (Io8) group partnership is a new Rata Professional Services initiative. A people-centred experience which encourages understanding, development and growth to stimulate different results built around - NEW thinking. NEW understanding.

To ensure efficiency in the COVID-19 vaccine delivery district health boards are using different approaches, appropriate to their specific regional delivery models, to ensure as much of the available vaccine as possible is used.

The new Medicinal Cannabis Scheme is being undermined with a significant volume of unregulated imports of unknown quality and consistency readily available, according to industry representatives.

From Monday, 1 March, the community based assessment centre (CBAC) on the Whanganui Hospital campus, which provides tests for COVID-19, will be open from 8.00am to 2.00pm, Monday to Friday.

There are 2 new cases of COVID-19 in managed isolation and one new community case, a person linked to the Auckland February cases and who has been in quarantine from Tuesday 23 February to report today.

The latest community case (Case L) is a household contact of cases I, J and K.

Māori nurses are tired of waiting for long-overdue action addressing the 25 percent pay gap between themselves and those working for district health boards.