Last month’s announcements covered a health sector delivery plan, governance, “partnerships”, telemedicine, primary care funding, workforce (overseas-trained doctors, more training placements for doctors and nurse practitioners, incentives for primary care practices to recruit nurses), and lowering the age for free bowel cancer screening. Each of these is worthy of a deep dive, and there is excellent analysis on most of these announcements, much of it in New Zealand Doctor Rata Aotearoa. But I couldn’t ignore the general pattern. None of these announcements are focused on Māori health outcomes. So, what does this package mean for Māori?
The short answer: very little.
It is, of course, by design. Our political atmosphere is in an unpleasantly divisive state. The pursuits of equity and the improvement of outcomes for those who the health (and other) systems have failed have gone from being widely accepted aims to being positioned as counter to the very ideas of respect, dignity and equality before the law (when it comes to Māori anyway). Aiming to have a workforce that reflects the population has also been deemed woke and identity politics.
