More Māori nurses urgently needed - NSO director

Nurses Organisation kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku. Photo / Paul Taylor

By Felix Walton of RNZ

The Nurses Organisation is calling for an urgent increase in the number of Māori nurses and says the health system needs to do a better job at accepting tikanga.

Though about 17% of the population is Māori, NZNO kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku said just 7% of the nursing workforce was Māori.

“If we were to look at our Māori population to the population of our Māori nursing workforce it doesn’t reflect anywhere near what it should,” she said.

“The less Māori we have to support Māori patients, let’s be real, they’re more vulnerable and more likely to turn up with comorbidity... not having Māori nurses there to provide culturally safe support for them it kind of does impact on the level of care they can receive.”

A new report released by Nuku at Waitangi makes a case for “culturally safe” staffing ratios developed by Māori nurses and defined by hapū and iwi.

It also calls for the embracing of tikanga to make Māori patients and nurses more comfortable.

“We asked Māori nurses: How difficult is it for you to work in the system that currently doesn’t acknowledge your cultural needs? For many of the Māori nurses they said that often when they turn up to work they have to leave their Māori-ness at the door,” Nuku said.

“The korowai that surrounds us as Māori nurses that they feel they’re having to leave at the door when they enter this very mainstream non-Māori western medical model of care, and pick it up as they walk out. There’s lots of people that have trampled on it as they’ve walked in and out.”

The report quoted Māori nurses who had described their experience in the medical field.

“My view of being safe is being able to walk into a building and no one is going to stare at me for being brown or having a moko kauae. No one is going to be like that ‘black fella’, you don’t really need to bring up the colour,” one nurse wrote.

“Cultural safety is where you can be who you are, who you are born to be, just being you, your authentic self and not being judged for it.”

Nuku also called for legislative and registration protections that ensured nurses had skills to work with Māori, including the ability to pronounce names.

“Pronunciation is incredibly important because it’s a sign of respect and for many if you can’t address somebody by their appropriate name, barriers go up,” she said.

“If you can’t do that, the decent thing is to ask people ‘have I pronounced that right?’ as opposed to just assuming it’s okay to just shorten their name.”

She hoped the report could give student nurses insight into the cultural challenges experienced by Māori patients.

“We’re hoping that it goes far and wide, we’re hoping that it gets used within the schools of nursing ... we hope it will be used as a learning tool,” Nuku said.

“We’ll continue to push this in front of every Government ... it will be one in a number of actions that we’ll take to ensure we’re aiming for a culturally safe workplace.”

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