November 2023 news
14 November 2023
Accredited Employer Work Visa
If you have become an accredited employer for overseas recruitment, from the 29 October you are no longer able to include a 90-day trial period in employment agreements. You can read more about this on Immigration NZ website.
Closedown periods
With the Christmas/New Year break rapidly approaching we are receiving queries about closing practices for the days between Christmas and New Year statutory public holidays.
Some businesses will observe an annual closedown. This applies when the business customarily closes down for this period each year. There are specific requirements under the Holidays Act, and in most cases you will have included a ‘Close Down’ clause in your employment agreements. This should detail your obligations around the notification period, what happens in terms of employees using annual holiday entitlement and what happens if they don’t have the annual leave entitlement or don’t have enough leave to cover the period. We have content about this at Close down periods (healthypractice.co.nz)
If you don’t customarily close down over this period but have decided that this year you would like to close, you need to do this in consultation with staff. You can direct your staff to use entitled leave with at least 14 days’ notice if you can’t come to agreement, but you may find that you will have to pay your staff for the days that you have chosen to close.
Annual Holidays
You and your staff will be planning their summer holidays and for some managers it will be a juggling act managing staff expectations about leave and having sufficient staff to provide services.
In general, annual holidays should be taken by agreement. When there are popular periods for leave like around Christmas and Easter, you need to be sure that you have a fair process for dealing with leave requests and allocation. We would recommend having a leave policy and an application process and we have sample templates at this link Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz)
Calculating holiday pay for permanent employees can be confusing. The rate of holiday pay must be paid at the greater of the employee’s ordinary pay or average weekly earnings over the last 12 months. Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz) The payment is different for employees returning from parental leave Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz)
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13 August 2026
21 years of HealthyPractice!
A lot has changed since the early days and HealthyPractice has transformed along the way to keep supporting practices in ways that are useful, practical and easy to work with. What has not changed is the heart of the service. It is still going strong. Most importantly, we would like to thank our Subscribers. Your support, feedback and trust over the past 21 years have helped shape HealthyPractice into what it is today, and we are so grateful to have been part of your journey while you have been part of ours.
16 July 2026
June on the road - Connecting with practices across New Zealand
Kia ora, We hope you are faring well, six months into 2026! At our end it’s been a busy month for the HealthyPractice team - here’s a quick snapshot of what we’ve been up to. It was great to connect face-to-face with practice owners, managers, clinicians and support teams at both the New Zealand Veterinary Association Te Pae Kīrehe Conference (NZVA) and the NZGPCME Primary Care Conference, both held in June. The MAS and HealthyPractice stand was a real hub of activity, helped along by a very popular coffee cart.
10 June 2026
Privacy updates and training
Due to recent changes, this month we wish to remind you of the update to the Privacy Act 2020 with a new principle called the Information Privacy Principle 3A (IPP3A). For practices’, the new principle means there are additional notification obligations when receiving personal information about a patient from a third party. Under IPP3A, if your practice receives patient information from another provider (such as a lab, hospital, specialist, pharmacy or ACC), you must take reasonable steps to let the patient know their information has been collected. This change applies to any information collected on or after 1st May 2026.
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