Emergency doctor Tom Mulholland is back on the road scouring rural communities for some of what he believes to be hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders suffering from undiagnosed diabetes, depression, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
His Walk the Talk Wellness Tour has seen him swap his scrubs for a Swaandri and hitting rural tracks on foot, to address what he describes as a rural health crisis.
"The crisis is that these dangerous conditions are treatable, but go unnoticed until it's too late, and people end up in the emergency department, or worse, in the morgue," he said.
As a health campaigner who had undertaken five nationwide health tours in his retro Chevrolet ambulance, he had a simple solution for the crisis, which he was employing on his latest crusade. Just like farmers have apps to measure their milk fat solids, he believes people should be measuring the most important numbers of all, their health numbers, using a simple app he had developed, Know Your Numbers Dashboard (KYND).
"We may ask each other 'Are you okay?' and the answer 90 per cent of the time will be 'Yeah, I'm okay mate," he said.