After 18 years of development, it's back to old Maori way

Judge Ken Mason at the opening of the unit at the Mason Clinic. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Eighteen years after a controversial Maori unit at the old Carrington Psychiatric Hospital was closed, a new Maori unit opened yesterday at its successor, the Mason Clinic.

The $5 million, 10-bed "secure village", Te Papakainga o Tane Whakapiripiri, was opened by Health Minister Pete Hodgson in front of 300 people representing all the traditional waka of Maoridom.

Judge Ken Mason was an honoured guest at the opening of the new unit - still the country's only secure mental health unit for criminal offenders based on a kaupapa Maori philosophy.

The clinic's associate service director in charge of Maori cultural input, Charles Joe, said cultural advisers worked alongside medical staff in all units, but it had taken years of consultation to finalise plans for the papakainga.

"In the last 10 years it has been a matter of pulling together the threads - where is the funding coming from? - and there was debate about what kaupapa Maori meant," he said.

"Often it means 'by Maori, for Maori'. Here we are a Maori unit within the hospital. It's only in the last three or four years that it's come together in terms of developing a village with a kaupapa Maori base.

"It uses Maori culture and practices and beliefs and then [Western] clinical practice would be complementary. It is a reversal of the system in the other units [which are based on Western medicine with complementary use of Maori beliefs]."

Mr Joe said there was a further hiccup two years ago when the Labour Government ordered a review of all "race-based" public services in the wake of National Party leader Don Brash's call for "needs-based" funding.

"It hasn't been plain sailing because of the various political influences in the last two years in terms of race-based and needs-based funding," he said.
In a brief speech, Mr Hodgson said the Government was "committed to reducing inequalities by responding to high need groups".

The unit will be managed by Nick Wiki, with a nursing staff that is 80 per cent Maori, and two Maori psychiatrists, Dr Rees Tapsell and Dr Claire Patterson.

Dr Tapsell said the Mason Clinic aimed to return all patients to the community as soon as they were well. The clinic supports 20 people in four hostels and about 30 people who have returned to their homes but remain under compulsory mental health treatment.

The clinic's director, Dr Sandy Simpson, said half of those discharged were now working. No one discharged in the past six years had been reconvicted of a violent offence.

He said the Mason Clinic's 104 beds represented less than 10 per cent of the beds in the former Carrington, Oakley, Kingseat and Mangere hospitals.

"Probably too many sub-acute and rehabilitation beds were closed, but this is very different to the old big institutions. What they were was not what we needed."

The Mason Report

* Judge Ken Mason 1988 report recommended closing the old Maori unit run by Titewhai Harawira, Whare Paia.

* The report led to creating a regional forensic psychiatry service and building the Mason Clinic in the grounds of the former Carrington Hospital (now Unitec).

* Six other units housing 94 offenders have opened since 1992. A further 12-bed unit for intellectually disabled offenders will open in May. Half of the patients are Maori.