Te Awakairangi Health Network has a small team of analysts that work with health information collected from general practices, hospitals and some other providers. We use modern tools and systems to help us keep your information private and secure. 

Good health records are essential for the continuity of care of patients. They enable the health practitioner to reconstruct the essential parts of each patient contact without reference to memory. They are comprehensive enough to allow a fellow registered health practitioner to either carry on where the previous practitioner left off, or use the information contained in the record as a basis for any subsequent course of treatment or care. Most consumers are comfortable that health providers share their information with other providers for the purposes of treatment and care. 

Your general practice team records information about your care every time you visit.  Te Awakairangi Health Network collects some of this information to support the management of health care services in the Hutt Valley.  This is gathered regularly and held in a data warehouse.  The information we collect includes your name, address, date of birth, ethnicity, information about the services provided to you by your general practice, prescriptions, and lab results.

Most of the information is used in a summary format, meaning individuals cannot be identified. We develop reports on the health of the population for our teams and the general practices in the Hutt Valley, to guide them on what health improvement programmes are needed and what programmes are working to improve our population’s health.

Te Awakairangi Health Network has a data governance group. This group looks carefully at how we use information and how we look after it. The group has representation from across the Hutt Valley, and includes Hutt Valley DHB, Māori health and social service providers, pharmacists and general practitioners.

We only use health information for the purposes of providing or managing health and social services.

Health services provided through Te Awakairangi Health Network and the general practices are funded through contracts from the DHBs and the Ministry of Health.  We share summary information with these funders to assure them we are delivering services to the right people in our population.  Some personally identifiable information is shared when a DHB or Ministry of Health funded service is provided for groups of people with specific health issues, to record that a service has been provided by Te Awakairangi Health Network.

Sometimes researchers ask us for information.  We are allowed to provide this if they have ethics approval from a recognised ethics committee.  These projects are usually associated with universities.

Occasionally we work with local community health and social care providers that are given contracts by the DHBs to provide a service to a specific group of people.  We assist community providers to identify people that are eligible and would benefit from a service.

You are allowed to access your health records, unless your doctor feels this may be harmful to you.

Although you are unable to change your record if you do not agree with something written, you are able to make annotations.

You can find out more about your rights as a health consumer here. If you would like to talk to someone about your information, please call 566 5320.

The Privacy Act has just been updated.  This guides us on our right to collect information and what responsibilities we have in accessing and managing personal information.  More information about the Act and what it means for health consumers can be found here.