We take great care to ensure the privacy of your health information is respected.

Te Whatu Ora Whanganui collects 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.

Your information is kept secure and only authorised people have access to it. This may include other agencies, where authorised by law.

Accessing your health information

If you are or have been a patient/client of WDHB, you have the right to ask for and be given access to your personal health information. This will generally be provided as photocopies of your health records.

The WDHB Request for information form (PDF) has various sections. The more specific you are about the information you want (e.g. notes from a particular admission in hospital or test results), the quicker we can respond to your request.

We require some form of photo identification so we can be sure we are sending it to the correct person. A copy of your driver’s licence, birth certificate, passport or similar is required. Requests received electronically still need to provide some form of photo 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 (photo identification)
• anything else that may assist us to deal with your request.

For general health record queries phone 06 348 1277 or email clinicalrecordsrequest@wdhb.org.nz
Correspondence should be sent to the Clinical Records Department, Te Whatu Ora Whanganui, Private Bag 3003, Whanganui.

Please note: requests for access to mental health patient information should be forwarded to the Te Whatu Ora Whanganui Mental Health Health Records Administrator on 06 348 3474 or email mentalhealthrecords@wdhb.org.nz

We have 20 working days to indicate to you if we will action your request. We can refuse your request but only for very 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 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 if this happens we will let you know that it may take longer. 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 be corrected.

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

For more information, please contact the Te Whatu Ora Whanganui Health Records Privacy Administrator on 06 348 3435.

Queries or concerns about your information

If you have any queries or concerns about how your personal information has been managed, please contact us to see if we can resolve the problem. You can:

Email us at hnzprivacy@health.govt.nz; or
Write to us at Privacy Officer – Te Whatu Ora, PO Box 793, Wellington 6140, New Zealand

If you’re not satisfied with our response to your concerns, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. For more information see the Office of the Privacy Commissioner website here: https://www.privacy.org.nz/your-rights/making-a-complaint/.