If anything proves why we need a new Māori Health Authority, it is this!
The shocking revelations last week of the Ministry of Health undercounting Māori vaccinations by as many as 100 000 is just another reason why a truly independent Māori Health Authority should be the preference over the behind the scenes bureaucratic power sharing arrangement it currently is proposed as.
The reason why the Ministry of Health adopted this measurement that undercounted is because it’s retrospective of all Māori users of their services and easy to collect.
Actually having to fund community outreach to places that aren’t welcoming or are suspicious of them is hard and difficult, especially if you have little whanau connection.
Mainstream health providers are set to engage with people who actively want to engage with them, they are not experts at reaching out to these Māori communities so funding for this outreach always gets downgraded and robbed by other louder budgets. The proposed Māori Health Authority that Christopher Luxon is so against will merely be able to fight to boost those community outreach budgets alongside funding contracts to do it.
That’s how underwhelming the current proposed Māori Health Authority framework really is.
We need a far bolder plan for Māori Health outcomes than a bureaucratic power sharing arrangement with the blunt force of a veto.
The pandemic highlighted the bleeding gums of our inequality, we have an obligation to fix what was broken.
First published on Waatea News.
Yes we desperately need a MHA but would also like to add our primary health care services (GP practices) also need a major shake up many of our people are receiving very poor services, not being referred, no blood tests to look for markers, no clinician referrals, being misdiagnosed or undiagnosed and by the time they find what is wrong with you its too fucken late. And we need more Maori doctors many of our doctors aren’t suitable for many reasons. So you might survive covid in our country but you will die from a curable survivable cancer if it is not diagnosed early enough. We as a people have had to fight for every fucken thing and frankly I am sick and tired of it as it wears you down and you can become cynical.
Why are there so few Maori doctors and education leaders. Those I know are as intellegent and hard working as any other nationality.There are funds to help them study which others cannot access .
if 100,000 maori where vaccinated but never appeared in the figures…how is that bad or racist?
THEY WERE VACCINATED at the end of the day.
yes the falsification needs to be investigated BUT more people were protected, 100.000 more.
It’s all racist Yuri. Everything is racist these days. Am I racist for calling you Yuri? Kiri Allen will be called racist next…
The problem is not with the count of vaccinated people, but with the population estimates. It seems that a person’s ethnicity may be recorded differently in the health system than how the same person would identify in a census, plus the health system only captures those who engage with the health service. The total number of people vaccinated does not change, but the demographic that they are placed into will affect the vaccination rate/percentage for that demographic.
None of this is really new, nor hidden. The Ministry of Health went with their own 2020 HSU data that was already integrated into the health system, rather than the older and flawed Census 2018 data. It wasn’t perfect but was thought to be the better of the two options and has been used with disclaimers. There were stories in the media when the Asian demographic exceeded 100% because the amount of people being vaccinated was higher than the population estimate in the health system. Similarly, when the Canterbury DHB reached 100% vaccination rate, it was also in the news about how the rates were dependent on the accuracy of the population estimates.
Racism in our country has come to the fore especially when you start delivering for the tangata whenua who have always been treated like second class citizens. And unless you have experienced it you don’t know what it is like and you don’t know how it effects and impacts negatively on people. And we have people who weren’t born here who bring their baggage and have a bloody cheek to be racist to us when they are f…n lucky to be in our country. When one group has had it all there way for 180 years it must be hard to share.
how is being vaccinated in greater numbers than reported racism and treating people as 2nd class?…yes there are many casually racist rednecks in NZ and cases of systemic racism…BUT this is not one of them.
also covid I pay taxes here, have citizenship and a passport, I actively chose NZ you just fell out in this geographic location so take your xenophobic horse shit and insert it where the sun don’t shine…sonny
When will we all become New Zealanders and put our racial origins behind us.
Not until there is no money to be made and egos to polished
No, please no more bureaucracy. Just employ more health professionals now!
Agreed Anker. More doctors and more nurses yes, more bureaucrats no. More ICU beds might be handy too.
I know not much about the MHA, but looking at some of the characters in that picture, I see a few ‘well connected’ bureaucrats – collecting lucrative fees I assume. Do they hold their meetings at a club called Bada Bing? That’s where ‘made guys’ hang out.
What gets me is that we had this campaign to vaccinate maori who were the least group to be vaccinated, or so we were told. Right? So which group is now the least vaccinated and could we shuffle some funds to that group?
If anything, actual Maori vaccination rates will be lower than reported. If the population estimate used to calculate the rates is significantly smaller than than the actual population, then the reported rate will be overstated. Maori already have the lowest overall vaccination rates, and likely to drop further when allowing for discrepancies in the health system population estimates.
Does the truth upset you gagarin, so you pay taxes, whippy do so do I and so does many Maori pay taxes but if we look at our records and perhaps do an audit to see who gets what, when and why, you will see we get less in all areas. In fact we get diddly squat and we get treated badly. Yes we need immigration as do many other countries but not when it is detrimental to our own wellbeing like National who brought in at least a million and who did this benefit the most, the same people Luxon wants to give a tax cut. At the moment the biggest beneficiaries are our elderly they are sucking up the health dollars and the cost to euthanize them falls on us the tax payer when palliative care is not even funded properly. The entire system in this country is set up to benefit the majority and that ain’t us, we are in catch up mode. I can give many example of racism in our country based on my own life experiences and that of my whanau and friends. Three waters and co-governance has caused an avalanche of racism so much for being a treaty partner when the partnership has been one sided and Maori are expected to settle for crumbs. This is simply not good enough and if that dick head Seymour gets in we could see civil unrest at a level we have not seen for a very long time.
ohhh covid did I suggest at any point that there is no racism in NZ..I’ll help you out NO I DID NOT
and if you attack me for being a foreigner you’ll get push back…playing the ‘my mum squatted here and dropped me’, doesn’t impress me.
I agree entirely lots of racism in NZ but I don’t see how the covid rollout was racist. There were ads on mainstream TV, Maori TV and Facebook in English and Maori telling people to just go and get a jab to protect themselves and their whanau. See the ad then go and get vaccinated. Maori as a group were the last to get vaccinated. That was the news story. Did statistical undercounting create a false narrative? Was it racist statistics? Was it a racist jump to conclusions about Maori being at the back of the vaccine que? In the end Maori recieved pragmatic additional covid vaccination response funding. But now it seems Maori were getting vaccinated effectively all along.
Firstly gagarin I did not attack you for being a foreigner we need immigration as do many other countries in fact most of the immigrants who have come here to our country have made great contributions and still do. My concern is when immigrants jump on the ‘bash the Maori bandwagon’ Joe Bennet comes to mind but I am sure I can think of many others as there are many.
find an instance when I have ‘bashed the maori’
iwiocracy yup they get a bash on class not race grounds(possibly turned up a notch because of my dislike of the uk aristos)
yup I despise dubious cries of ‘racism’ when other serious issues for maori are sidelined by triggered activists.