Drunk patients account for almost a third of those seeking emergency hospital treatment on Saturday nights, research shows.

At Auckland City Hospital, about 10 surgery patients in every 1,000 will suffer a major internal infection after their operation.

The noise from major construction is upsetting patients at Auckland City Hospital, who are being offered earplugs to block out the banging and crashing.

The Counties Manukau District Health Board spends more than $2 million a year on travel - but it didn't offer to pay for a taxi when it discharged Natasha Teller overnight.

Ill-prepared families are dumping elderly relatives at hospitals before going on their holidays in a practice known as "granny dumping".

A nurse who verbally abused patients, fell asleep on the job and spent hours surfing the web has won $2.5k compensation after being wrongly dismissed.

One in five patients who turn up in NZ hospital emergency departments in the small hours of the morning are there because of booze, a study has found.

About 280,000 New Zealanders are waiting for elective surgery, and more than half are not on waiting lists, new research shows.

Two 60-year-old men in the Dutch city of Breda had an emotional meeting after a DNA test proved they had been mixed up as babies and given to the wrong mothers in 1953.

A woman who died in childbirth and the death of a teenage boy who was sent home with a serious infection are two of almost 500 adverse events reported in NZ hospitals.

Immigration officials will consider removing GPs from a skills shortage list as newly qualified immigrant doctors struggle to find jobs in hospitals.

Two mothers of sick babies in hospital have spoken out about being refused meals because they weren't breastfeeding.

Mothers of sick children are offered more meals per day at public hospitals in Auckland than in Hamilton, and whether a mother is breastfeeding plays a lesser role or none at all.

The Auckland District Health Board is in the firing line again after yesterday admitting it accidentally kept 14 tissue samples from 10 dead patients, despite the coroner ordering a return to families.

Nasie Bayley has such a rare condition in her digestive system doctors consulted leading international specialists before operating.

An American doctor continues to work in Tauranga Hospital's emergency department as more revelations of past police and medical investigations surface.

In an unprecedented peek behind the closed doors of NZ's hospital wards, a junior doctor reveals the delays, duplication and waste that she says are compromising the provision of good health care.

It is just after 8 o'clock on Friday night and Lee Mohr is doubled up in pain, alone at a bus stop outside Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland.

Legal highs must be banned sooner rather than later, says a Coroner who ruled on the deaths of two young men who both died shortly after taking K2 and party pills.

An increase in the number of patients showing up at emergency departments paranoid and agitated on synthetic cannabis is delaying the treatment of more worthy cases, says an emergency doctor.

The senior doctors' union has objected to what it calls an "over-the-top" privacy agreement sent to Auckland District Health Board staff after files of a patient admitted to hospital with an eel inside him were improperly accessed.

Big Brother is watching the doctors and nurses at the North Shore University Hospital in Long Island and he wants them to wash their hands.