A change to New Zealand’s privacy law is quietly reshaping one of the most delicate conversations a family doctor can have, the one about whether an ageing parent is still safe behind the wheel.
Since 1 May this year, a new rule in the Privacy Act means that when a general practitioner is told something about a patient by a third party, such as a worried son or a concerned neighbour, the doctor must take reasonable steps to let the patient know what was collected and why. The rule is known as Information Privacy Principle 3A. It was introduced by the Privacy Amendment Act 2025 and applies to information gathered from someone other than the patient after that date.
For most medical records the change is routine. For older drivers it has landed in a sensitive spot. As 1News reported, more than 11,000 people in their nineties still hold a current driver licence, and the number of licensed drivers aged 75 and over has risen 53 percent in the past decade. That is exactly the group whose families are most likely to pick up the phone to a GP and say they are worried.
Katikati general practitioner Dr Vicky Jones told 1News the law was not written with medical practices in mind. “When this law was changed, it obviously didn’t have us in mind at all,” she said. Her concern is simple. Under the new principle, a doctor who acts on a family member’s warning may now have to tell the patient that the information came in at all. “What people have to understand now is that we have an obligation to pass that information on to the patient,” she said.
The fear among some doctors is that once families realise their quiet word might be relayed straight back to mum or dad, they will simply stop making the call. A concern raised in confidence can be the first thread a GP pulls on, and if that thread disappears, so does an early chance to catch a problem before it ends in a crash.
Dr Jones described the difficulty many older patients have in judging their own driving. “As people get older, they become frailer, their cognition can start becoming impaired,” she said, adding that “there are definitely instances where patients don’t have great insight into their driving ability.” Family members are often the first to notice the warning signs, a near miss on a familiar route, a new dent that nobody can explain, or a parent who has started avoiding roundabouts and left turns.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has tried to soften the edges of the new rule. Its guidance makes clear that a doctor does not have to name the person who raised the concern. The obligation is to explain what was collected and why, not who said it. There are also exceptions built into the principle. A GP does not have to notify a patient if doing so would create a serious threat to someone’s life or health, or would prejudice the very purpose the information was collected for.
That last exception could carry real weight in driving cases, because the point of a fitness assessment is public safety. Whether it covers a routine family phone call, or only the more serious cases, is the kind of judgement each doctor will now have to make one patient at a time. The wider law change is set out on the Ministry of Justice’s page on the Privacy Act reforms.
None of this changes the separate power doctors have held for years. Under section 18 of the Land Transport Act 1998, a health practitioner who believes in good faith that a patient has a medical condition affecting their ability to drive safely, and who is likely to keep driving, can notify NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi. The agency’s own guidance for health practitioners confirms they are protected from civil or professional liability when they do so. That reporting pathway sits alongside the licensing rules that already require a medical certificate from a GP when a driver turns 75, again at 80, and every two years after that.
So the friction is not really about reporting an unsafe driver. Doctors can still do that, and the tools to do it have not changed. The friction is about the conversation before that point, the informal warning from a relative that never reaches the formal system, and whether the new duty to be transparent with patients will make those warnings harder to come by.
It is a genuine tension rather than a simple failure of the law. The Privacy Amendment Act was designed to fix a real gap. For years, organisations had to tell people when they collected information directly from them, but faced no equivalent duty when they gathered it from someone else. A person could have a file built up about them from third parties and never know. IPP 3A closes that gap across banks, insurers, employers and government agencies, and it treats people as adults who are entitled to know what is held about them and why. Medical practices are simply one corner of a much broader reform.
New Zealand’s ageing population guarantees the question will only grow. The number of older drivers is climbing, most of them drive safely for years, and mobility is central to living independently in later life. Balancing that against the safety of everyone else on the road has always relied on a mix of formal tests and quiet honesty from the people closest to an older driver. The new privacy rules do not remove either of those, but they do change the terms on which the honest, difficult conversations happen.
For families weighing whether to raise a concern, the practical takeaway is worth keeping in mind. A doctor may now have to acknowledge to the patient that some information came from a family member, but does not have to say who, and the option to contact NZTA directly about an unsafe driver remains open to anyone who is genuinely worried.
Have you had to talk to an older relative about giving up driving, or navigated it as an older driver yourself? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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