Health Practitioners (Protected Quality Assurance Activity—Australasian Vascular Audit) Notice 2021

2021/408

Coat of Arms of New Zealand

Health Practitioners (Protected Quality Assurance Activity—Australasian Vascular Audit) Notice 2021

Pursuant to section 54(3) of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003, the Minister of Health, being satisfied of the matters set out in that subsection, gives the following notice.

Notice

1 Title

This notice is the Health Practitioners (Protected Quality Assurance Activity—Australasian Vascular Audit) Notice 2021.

2 Commencement

This notice comes into force on the day after the date of its notification in the Gazette.

3 Interpretation

In this notice,—

Audit Committee means the Audit Committee of the Australasian Vascular Audit

specified health practitioner means a vascular surgeon or interventional radiologist who is—

(a)

in New Zealand; and

(b)

participating in the Australasian Vascular Audit.

4 Declaration of protected quality assurance activities

The following quality assurance activities are protected to the extent that they are undertaken by the Audit Committee in relation to specified health practitioners:

(a)

submitting encrypted data on arterial or venous procedures and their outcomes to a computerised database, encrypted through a web page, an email attachment, or a CD:

(b)

analysis by the Audit Committee of the procedures and their outcomes, with the identity of each specified health practitioner anonymised, to look for outcomes that fall outside the expected performance for a particular procedure:

(c)

reporting the results of the most common procedures, by both presentation and a written report, to the annual meeting of the Australasian Vascular Audit, with the identity of each specified health practitioner anonymised.

Dated at Wellington this 22nd day of November 2021.

Hon Andrew Little,
Minister of Health.

Explanatory note

This note is not part of the notice, but is intended to indicate its general effect.

This notice comes into force on the day after the date of its notification in the Gazette. It declares the quality assurance activities described in clause 4 to be protected. Quality assurance activities are activities that are undertaken to improve the practices or competence of health practitioners by assessing the health services performed by those practitioners.

The effect of protecting a quality assurance activity is that—

  • any information that becomes known solely as a result of the activity is confidential; and

  • any documents brought into existence solely for the purposes of the activity are confidential; and

  • the persons who engage in the activity in good faith are immune from civil liability.

The protections given by this notice are subject to certain statutory exceptions. For example, this notice does not prohibit the disclosure of information that does not identify, either expressly or by implication, a particular individual.

This notice remains in force for 5 years, unless revoked before then.

Issued under the authority of the Legislation Act 2019.

Date of notification in Gazette: 2 December 2021.

This notice is administered by the Ministry of Health.