Āwhina app terms and conditions

When you first open Āwhina, you will be asked to enter your preferences for your region and area of the health sector.  These preferences are used to present relevant content to you and to provide notifications.  Your preferences can be changed at any time. Notifications will be set to ‘on’ by default. 

Before commencing the sign-up process for Āwhina, you need to consent to the terms and conditions which are provided below.

The information provided in Āwhina has been collated from a range of organisations as a service to health workers. We believe that access to information is important, and notifications are also important for keeping you up-to-date.

Information will be presented to you based on your preferences. Ministry of Health (the Ministry) will do it's best to categorise content accurately; however, takes no responsibility for the accuracy of this categorisation.

Consent

As a part of the sign-up process, we ask you to:
consent

• to the information provided by you and the Āwhina App, in order to improve the service
• agree that the Ministry will endeavour to categorise correctly but will not be held liable in the case that categorisation is not correct
• consent to the Ministry holding your email address and feedback for the period of time for which it is required to act and respond.

External links

Āwhina contains external links to other websites. While most of these have been checked for quality and accuracy, the nature of the internet means it is impossible to guarantee everything is as initially designed or checked. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the user to make their own decisions about the accuracy, currency, reliability and correctness of the information contained in linked external websites. Users of links provided by the Āwhina App are responsible for being aware of which organisation is hosting the site they visit.  Links to external websites are not be taken to be an endorsement or a recommendation of information or services offered by the Āwhina App.

Advertising

The Āwhina App does not host any form of advertising and is committed to providing independent, trustworthy advice and resources.

Copyright

All information and materials in the Āwhina App, including data, content, documents, online graphics, images and web pages, audio and video are protected by copyright, and are the property of the copyright holder, or contributing organisation unless specifically notified to the contrary. The Ministry (on behalf of the New Zealand Crown) licenses you to copy, distribute and adapt that content in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 New Zealand Licence. You should understand the terms of the licence, which requires that you attribute the content and software to the New Zealand Crown and the Āwhina App, See CC-BY 4.0 NZ License terms.

Privacy Statement

No personal information will be asked for, or retained, at this time. There may be a time in the future where an authentication process is introduced, at which time you will be presented with a new privacy statement and terms and conditions.

Questions about privacy

Contact the Te Whatu Ora’s chief privacy officer via our feedback functionality on the App or at awhina.info@health.govt.nz.

Submitting feedback

When you submit feedback via the feedback function in the Āwhina App, the App opens an email and enables you to send an email to the Ministry.  We would receive your email address and any other personal information which you choose to share in the email.

The legal basis for collecting information

The Ministry operates this privacy policy in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020 and the Health Information Privacy Code 2020. The Privacy Act 2020 as administered by the Ministry of Justice regulates how we collect, use, hold, disclose, access, correct, manage and dispose of your personal information. For more information see: Office of the Privacy Commissioner website.

Non-personal information

We collect non-personal information that cannot be used to identify you personally but is used to analyse, improve and customise the Āwhina App. This includes:

• your IP address
• the search terms used
• the pages accessed in the Āwhina App and the links clicked
• the dates and times you used the Āwhina App
• your operating system and device (e.g. iPhone 7 running iOS 12.2)
• we are also using AWS services to analyse the audience of the Āwhina App to improve our service.

Non-personal information is used to investigate issues such as service availability, quality and malicious use. This information is kept in our internet access logs. We also aggregate non-personal information to track trends and analyse use patterns. These terms and conditions do not limit in any way our use of non-personal information, and we reserve the right to use and disclose such non-personal information to our partners, at our discretion.

How we use, retain, and share information

We analyse information to see what is most effective about our service to help us identify ways to improve it. We may also use information for other purposes, which we would describe to you at the point when we collect the information.

Your comments and ratings

Your comments are provided to the Ministry for the purpose of improving the Āwhina App. We receive details of your feedback and the name and email address you submit. If you submit this when you are logged in, we will also collect information about your experience to help us understand your comments.  Your email address, comments and any other personal information that you choose to share via the app feedback will only be held for the period for which it is needed.

How we keep your information secure

Your sensitive information will be held in encrypted form in our storage system. The Ministry will protect your information so that it is not accessed or shared with others without your consent. We implement security measures designed to protect your information from unauthorised access. Those security measures include encryption, firewalls and secure sockets layer technology.

If you have concerns that you have been provided information that is not yours, please contact awhina.info@health.govt.nz.

Contact us

If you have any questions regarding these terms and conditions, please contact us by sending an email:  awhina.info@health.govt.nz