Making treatment safer

We're supporting health professionals to provide safe treatment for New Zealanders.

A treatment injury is a personal injury related to treatment from a registered health professional. There are some exclusions.

Encouraging safer treatment

Supporting safer healthcare reduces the amount and severity of harm that may happen when you undergo medical treatment. This means there will be less harm, shorter hospital stays and less chance of re-admission.

We accept over 15,000 claims for injuries caused by treatments every year., many of these injuries were preventable.

We're here to assist you when you’re injured. In most cases, injuries will resolve quickly, but for a small number of cases, it can have a lasting impact on you and your family.

We also help health professionals learn from treatment injuries, to prevent the same injuries from happening again.

To encourage conversations around treatment safety, we provide detailed information on treatment injuries in public and private surgical hospitals to Health Quality & Safety Commission - Te Tāhū Hauora.

We published a report in 2021 on claims for treatment injuries in New Zealand. It helps us understand why these injuries happen, so we can support work to prevent them.

Supporting treatment safety