Wairarapa and Hutt Valley DHBs forge closer relationship

12 February 2013

Media release: Wairarapa and Hutt Valley DHBs forge closer relationship

Wairarapa and Hutt Valley DHBs are forging closer relationships as they begin a process of creating one executive team across the two DHBs.

“The 3DHB Programme announced in October last year laid the blueprint for working more closely. The first part of this was made real when I was appointed as CE across Wairarapa and Hutt Valley DHBs in December. We are now beginning the formal consultation process to create a single executive team,” says CE Graham Dyer. “I’m impressed with the professionalism and readiness to share ideas shown by the senior teams on both sides of the hill. At some joint workshops to consider how we will best work together, we discovered more similarities than differences between the two organisations, particularly in the areas of what we value.

There is a huge amount of creativity, knowledge and dedication in both organisations that we need to retain.”

Mr Dyer says there are three parts to wanting to work more closely. “We want to make the health journey for patients less complicated, we want to improve the health of our shared population and we want to make best use of resources. I believe we can best do this through working in partnership, especially as we focus on prevention and early detection of health issues.”

The two DHBs are using an innovative on-line consultation tool to share ideas across sites. The ‘Consider This’ tool is designed specifically to enable online discussion. Employees are able to log on and ‘blog’ their response to proposals, add comments and ask questions online. Staff can also read comments from others and vote to ‘agree’ with other people’s comments.

“This is a good test of how we can use technology to communicate better between sites,” says Mr Dyer. “As we develop our health services more along the lines of ‘single service over several sites’, we will need to find new ways to communicate, to reduce duplication of time and effort for patients and staff. Encouraging staff to explore the benefits of on-line communication is an important part of this.”

The consultation process will take place over February and March, with the resulting new structure planned to be in place in April.

Ends.

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