Emma spends lockdown at Auckland hospital, and sees how government action on COVID-19 underlines the lack of urgency when it comes to Māori health.

Emma spends lockdown at Auckland hospital, and sees how government action on COVID-19 underlines the lack of urgency when it comes to Māori health.

By Gabrielle Baker

Getting Better consulting producer Gabrielle Baker (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kuri) is a public policy and Māori health expert whose focus is on creating a just and effective health system. Here she reflects on hope, worry, and the prospect of a "new normal" after COVID-19.

During alert level four, most of us were unsettled in some way. And for many of us, the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it the added worry that Māori would be left irreparably harmed.

The worry was built on whānau stories of the 1918 Influenza pandemic, which saw the death rate for Māori approximately seven times as high as it was for non-Māori and decades of research on health inequity in Aotearoa which show across almost every health and disability indicator the health system does less well for Māori than it does for Pākehā.

Recently, Dr Melissa McLeod wrote, with a group of other leading Māori health researchers about the increased risks of Covid for Māori. This includes an increased risk of getting Covid and worse outcomes from Covid, not to mention the wider reaching consequences beyond the virus itself, like rising unemployment. All of these concerns were occupying many of our thoughts during alert level four and, in my case at least, driving us to distraction.

"Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to "normality", trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality."

When I read these words from Arundhati Roy's in April, I got to take a moment out of the worries to be a little hopeful. At some point beyond the state of emergency, would we have a once-in-a-generation chance to create a new normal and leave behind the stale ideas in the health system that disproportionately impact Māori whānau, people with lived experience of disability, takatāpui and rainbow communities, refugee and migrant families, and many poorer communities? …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details