In a new attempt to control New Zealand's obesity epidemic, severely overweight patients will have a stomach drain installed through which they pump out excess food.

Police have confirmed an investigation is underway into the death of teenager Matthew Gunter at Grey Base hospital.

The general manager of the hospital where the anaesthetist practises said he was not aware of her connection to the Greymouth case.

The Government will not be paying for all primary aged children to attend the doctor for free, documents have revealed.

A traumatised family have hit out at the health system over the "totally avoidable" death of their 15-year-old son.

Here are four medical botch-ups that have been reported on so far in 2015.

Dr Lance O'Sullivan, who was named New Zealander of the Year 2014, said all parents - no matter their income - should be compelled to vaccinate.

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

Despite overwhelming evidence in favour of immunisation, the Government will not revisit a proposal to make it a condition of the benefit, Prime Minister John Key says.

An Auckland hospital for the elderly failed to make a written plan on how staff would prevent a high-risk resident from developing pressure sores.

When Dan Collins' late father was hit by a rare medical condition a few years ago, Collins was surprised by what he saw of the health system.

Australian parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids won't get taxpayer-funded childcare or welfare benefits under the federal Government's "no jab, no pay" policy.

Murray Jackson says he would rather die than suffer again the 19 violent jolts he received from a small defibrillator that had been implanted within his chest.

A lawyer acting for a psychiatric patient will fight to overturn a smoking ban at mental health units in the Court of Appeal this month.

If we could see the way we look when we are drunk we might never get drunk again.

Pressure to broaden the use of identification numbers attached to preschoolers has concerned the Privacy Commissioner.

People eligible for state-paid influenza vaccinations are being urged to book their pre-winter jab immediately.

A GP has been faulted for stopping the blood-thinning medication of a new patient - who later suffered a series of strokes and died - without reading the man's medical history in sufficient detail.

An 8-year-old Manurewa boy is one of 11,000 disabled children to lose a welfare benefit, even though his asthma is so bad that he missed one in every four school days.

Details of people's prescriptions are being fed into an online repository from pharmacies across the country.

It must be one of the weirdest health care procedures on offer and it just keeps getting weirder. Its clinical name: faecal transplantation.

In 2012, Liron Rosin was 8 when he was diagnosed with an inoperable liver cancer rare in children.

An investigation into the use of cannabis for medical purposes has been carried out by the Ministry of Health.

A woman spent five days in hospital recovering from liver problems caused by being given the wrong medicine by a pharmacist.

Sexually transmitted infections should be reclassified to enable better tracking and treatment as social media influences sexual behaviour and more drug-resistant strains emerge, a health authority....

The case of an 82-year-old who died after being prescribed a high-dose opioid has been given as an example of why better medical understanding is needed.

One in four babies is not receiving all of its core health checks in the first year of its life, according to a new data.

A forensic mental health nurse who had sex with a recent patient after giving her wine quit his district health board job as soon as he was outed.

Blues captain Jerome Kaino receives his new playing jersey from teenage patient Tyrone Banks at Starship children's hospital.

Researchers have come up with the first precise risk estimates of people developing stomach cancer if they have inherited certain gene mutations.