Your health information

Hawke’s Bay District Health Board takes great care to ensure the privacy of your health information is respected.

We collect information about you and your health to provide you with appropriate care, to keep you and others safe, to plan for and fund health services, to carry out teaching and research, and for statistical purposes. This information is shared with others involved in your health care.

Be assured that your information is kept secure. Only authorised persons have access to your information. This may include other agencies, where authorised by law.

Accessing your health information

If you are or have been a patient or client of Hawke's Bay District Health Board you have a right to ask for and be given access to your personal health information. This will generally be provided as photocopies of your health records.

If you wish to obtain your health records, please fill in the form: Request for Access to Personal Information

We require some form of identification so we can be sure that we are sending it to the correct person. A copy of your driver’s licence, birth certificate or similar is required. Requests received electronically still need to provide some form of identification.

If you prefer to send us a letter, please be sure to include the following:

  • your full name (and any other names you have been known by)
  • your date of birth
  • your National Health Index (NHI) number if known
  • the information you are requesting
  • contact details in case we need to query anything
  • proof of identity
  • anything else that may assist us to deal with your request.

Correspondence should be sent to the Health Records Department, Hawke’s Bay District Health Board, Private Bag 9014, Hastings 4156

We have 20 working days to indicate to you if we will action your request. We can refuse your request, but only for limited reasons which we would explain at the time.

In most cases we should be able to provide you with the information within 20 working days. If your request is urgent please state the reasons why the request is urgent and we will do our best to assist.

Sometimes we may contact you if there is a lot of information available to ensure that we supply what you need. Where there is a lot of information to be provided we may not be able to supply it all within the 20 working days but we will certainly inform you that we are dealing with your request.

There is no charge for the provision of this information.

Correcting information

If you think that the information we hold is inaccurate, you are entitled to ask for it to be corrected.

Apart from simple factual information (such as your name, date of birth, ethnicity) you may be invited to provide a statement of the correction sought. This statement will be attached to your file.

Accessing another person’s health information

If you wish to access another person’s medical records, we will require that person’s consent before we can release their information to you. Please note that the request form includes a place for the patient's signature to indicate that we are authorised to disclose the information to you. In certain limited circumstances, we may be able to release medical records to a third party without the patient’s consent.