 TRUST Māori health providers to look after Māori communities in a pandemic, says Turanga Health in a government-funded report on how it managed Covid-19 in Tairāwhiti.
The decision to vaccinate people at every opportunity, even when it meant deviating from the Government’s established criteria, was pivotal to achieving high rates of vaccine coverage in Tairāwhiti, the report says. Turanga Health administered nearly 21,000 vaccinations between May 2021 and December 2022, with 60 percent of the vaccinations received by Māori. Turanga Health held 185 drive-through and 161 static clinics at 173 urban and 65 rural settings, 33 workplaces, and 30 education centres. “We recognised the urgent imperative for action and vaccinated all whānau at every opportunity,” says Dr Shirley Keown, who is Turanga Health’s quality and research clinical advisor and the locally-based senior report researcher. The report Tangata Rite is part of nationwide Ministry of Health-funded research into ongoing impacts of Covid-19 and future pandemic responses. The local research included an exhaustive review of all the work carried out between 2020 and 2022, as well as interviews, surveys and wananga with kaimahi and stakeholders. Public feedback collected in real time was collated to help recapture the experiences of people who were vaccinated. Dr Keown says in the early days of vaccination in 2021, the region’s largest primary health care provider faced a dilemma whether to vaccinate family attending vaccination events along with their older family members. “At the time, systematic barriers were preventing us from vaccinating everyone despite us being right there in those hard-to-reach vulnerable communities.” “Around Aotearoa we were watching regions like ours struggling to reach vaccination targets. We were feeling frustrated that local Māori would miss out on Covid-19 vaccination if we didn’t take advantage of all the opportunities we were creating,” says Dr Keown. Staff vaccinated allcomers. Turanga Health’s nimble whānau-focussed response illustrates the value of Māori expertise and knowledge of local communities, says Reweti Ropiha, chief executive of Turanga Health. “We learned the importance of being bold, being responsive, and doing what is right by our people. We were willing to back ourselves to develop and implement a local approach that was proactive rather than reactive.” Māori communities have borne a disproportionate burden of mortality in previous pandemics, and we didn’t want that to happen again, he adds. Recommendations to come out of the review urge the Government to position Māori health providers at the forefront of any future pandemic responses. Recommendations include that essential service status be automatically granted to Māori health providers; vaccinating staff have real time access to national immunisation data; and organisations receive more resources for mobile health services. Māori health providers should not only co-design national health measures, they should co-decide, the report stresses. The research also looked at Turanga Health’s quick adoption of the kaiāwhina workforce in the vaccination space, and the way it created a whānau fun atmosphere at vaccinations events with music, kai, and koha. These were recognised to have increased the number of Māori vaccinated.
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