Recruitment to vacancies and other executive team changes

We have appointed Nick Wilson to be the director of communications. He comes to us with a good mix of skills having worked as a journalist before shifting to communications where he has worked across the public and private sectors. Nick currently leads the Communications team at Unitec and previously was communications manager at Huawei.

Nick Wilson

Restructure of tier 3 management

The restructure document for tier 3 will be published very shortly and then after a two week consultation it will be implemented. As CE I am responsible for the smooth running of Waikato DHB and ultimately responsible for any failings.

Any executive team is a key organisational design choice, including the size of that executive team and the delineation of functions. The intention of the executive restructure is to focus on organisational wide and strategic level decisions and applying this framework in an intentional way.

There are many good people in and around the executive leadership team who are accountable directly to me but there are simply too many for me to provide oversight on and the executive leadership team is too large to provide for effective decision-making.

I believe it is important that at the executive level there is a clear focus on the clinical perspective and clinical quality. Waikato DHB is a complex health system that provides tertiary services for the Midland Region of over 900,000 people.

Interim chief operating officer appointed for Waikato DHB as Ron Dunham leaves

Interim chief operating officer Ron Dunham is leaving Waikato DHB on Friday 1 November. Director of Ambulatory, Cancer and Regional services Alex Gordon will take the role of acting chief operating officer when he returns from annual leave on Tuesday 5 November, replacing Ron who has been interim chief operating officer since January 2019. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ron for stepping into this challenging role and staying with us for much longer than he intended. Your support has been much appreciated.

Alex will be in the role until Leena Singh joins us in January 2020 as permanent executive director of Hospital and Community services.