All elective surgery has been postponed at Auckland and Starship Hospitals as technicians scramble to fix a back-up power failure at Auckland and Starship hospitals.

Midwives are being sought in Christchurch as the number of premature births rises in the wake of Tuesday's earthquake.

An Australian army field hospital is set to be turned into a community health centre as authorities work to prevent a medical crisis in Christchurch.

Christchurch hospitals are busy but coping as patient numbers swell from the earthquake.

North Island hospitals are receiving Christchurch earthquake victims and plan to send specialists to help in the devastated city.

A medical recruitment company claims to have seen a 300 per cent rise in New Zealand doctors leaving to find better pay in Australia in the last year.

Reforms helped create IT systems that are envied by other countries.

A spiralling shortage of doctors has sparked a warning of future "severe safety issues" in New Zealand hospitals, with predictions that patients could suffer from increasing medical mistakes and treatment delays without urgent action.

Friends have spoken of their grief after the death of Sarah Carter, the 23-year-old new Zealander who died from food poisoning in Thailand at the weekend, on a Facebook tribute page.

A dream OE has turned to tragedy for three young NZ women after food poisoning killed one and left the other two in hospital.

More than a third of health workers fail to clean their hands every time they should, a snapshot of 10 Middlemore wards indicates.

Oregon's state mental hospital is trying to match surviving relatives with 3,500 people whose cremated remains were once stacked away in a storage area dubbed the "room of forgotten souls."