Health professionals are walking off the job in Auckland this week in protest against "an over-stretched workforce unable to meet its patients' needs".

Dr Judith Heather Gill, 58, appeared in Auckland District Court this week facing 157 charges of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception.

Hospitals in north and West Auckland have had to postpone non-urgent surgery to cope with the winter's first surge of acutely unwell patients.

District health boards that do heart surgery cannot produce reliable comparisons of individual surgeons' patient complication and death rates.

The rules restricting enrolment of unconscious patients in drug trials without their prior consent will be reviewed - more than seven months after an outcry.

Pies are expected to be cut from public menus at the Auckland District Health Board as officials try to make their hospitals into models of healthy eating and drinking.

The national organ donation service at the Auckland DHB has been put on notice by an official-information watchdog after it was caught out deleting public records.

Hundreds of health workers are being bitten, head-butted and assaulted while they look after sick, injured and distressed patients.

Diagnostic Medlab will have just one laboratory, Medlab Central, in Palmerston North. The long-established Auckland community laboratory that lost most of its state funding in a contracting wrangle will close next year.

One person has been injured after an explosion in a lift in the Westpac building on lower Queen St in downtown Auckland this morning.

A man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia tried to kill his brother-in-law days after being released from a mental health unit at Auckland Hospital.

Auckland District Health Board staff have blundered by sending a journalist an envelope filled with personal information and are now apologising to the people involved.

A health authority has taken charge of an Auckland rest home after planning and management failings amounting to "evidence of neglect".

The widow of a man who died of a heart attack while on the Auckland DHB waiting list for treatment is unconvinced the board has changed enough to avoid similar occurrences.

Forget chips and dip after work on Friday - the Air New Zealand sports and social club has an $8 million property portfolio with which to treat workers.

A threat to ban smokers from Auckland's top DHB splits nzherald readers.

North Island hospitals are receiving Christchurch earthquake victims and plan to send specialists to help in the devastated city.