Senior Planner - Protection - NPHS

• Contribute to making a difference to health outcomes for New Zealand, join the Protection team within National Public Health Service
• Location: National or any regional NPHS office location
• Permanent, Full-Time

Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora is the country's largest employer, delivering universal public healthcare to 5 million New Zealanders.

We provide essential hospital, specialist, and community health services across 80+ locations from large urban centres to rural towns and remote communities. 

Our goal is to improve health outcomes for all New Zealanders by delivering equitable, accessible, and innovative care. 

About the Role

As a Senior Planner, you will translate the Health Protection strategy into deliverable plans for the National Public Health Service (NPHS) and Health New Zealand (HNZ), with particular emphasis on communicable disease management and control, pandemic planning and wider outbreak control, as well as an all-hazards approach to support positive outcomes, including emerging threats.

The Senior Planner will focus on the planning and readiness for HNZ and NPHS including maintaining a national response plan to enable the NZ government to stand-up a national quarantine capability (NQC) in the event of a border closure.

About the Team/Service/ Location

The NPHS within Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora, work towards Pae Ora (healthy futures) for all by engaging with the wider determinants that impact people's health, focusing on oranga/wellbeing, prevention, protection, and population-level intervention. We are connected across boundaries to deliver public health services that are nationally planned, regionally delivered and locally tailored.

About you

Our ideal candidate is a strategic and operational planning extraordinaire! We need someone with proven experience in developing and maintaining strategic as well as operational plans. You contribute advice and expertise on aligning business planning processes with best practice. You have people at the heart and are focused on ensuring better health outcomes for New Zealand.

You engage with wide groups of stakeholders to blend technical advice and practical outcomes into your planning work. You take complex information and simplify it, cutting out the noise. You are a high-level communicator who can practically present information to varied groups of stakeholders. You have conceptual and analytical expertise which you use to inform and enhance your work. You are capable of planning across different systems and testing the organisational preparedness to act. You can confidently manage relationships at all levels and across organisations.

Our Preferred candidate will be:

• Experienced in developing and maintaining strategic and operational plans
• Able to show a demonstrated ability to use expert advice, engagement, and data to create insights enabling future focused strategic and operational planning and outcome driven solutions
• Experienced in taking information from multiple sources and applying critical thinking and using sound judgment to develop options
• Experienced in working with the machinery of government, and on policy development
• Experienced in implementing Te Tiriti o Waitangi in action
• Able to apply the requirements of accountability documents such as the Government Policy Statement, NZ Health plan, or other core documents to enable outcomes such as pandemic planning or outbreak management
• Able to implement an all-hazards approach to planning and engagement
• Hold a relevant tertiary qualification or comparable experience

Working for Health New Zealand

Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora is dedicated to ensuring excellent healthcare for the people of New Zealand. We embrace a workforce that is diverse and inclusive so that we are better positioned to understand and service our community. We welcome applications from our diverse Māori, Pacific, disabled, and rainbow communities.

How to Apply

To apply please click “apply now.” All applications must be submitted through our online careers' portal by Tuesday, 25 November 2025. If you have any questions about the role, please contact Anesha Pillay via Anesha.pillay@tewhatuora.govt.nz

This role is open to internal applications only.

Where retaining preference for those employees disestablished within this directorate, given the number of new positions is greater, we welcome applications from internal candidates in any directorate whose substantive position has been disestablished by an organisational change process.