As they warm up, the exercise class move their hands and hips in unison to a “kapa rima”, a Cook Islands action song. Then, after tackling resistance exercises simulating the movements used to prepare coconut cream, there’s a heart-pumping session of “uru pā'u” – a dance accompanied by Cook Island drums – before a warm-down.
For the participants, their heart rates starting to lower, the class was clearly a physical exercise, but for Dr Troy Ruhe, it was also an academic one.
The class was based on an exercise model called Niu Movement that the University of Otago health researcher developed as part of his PhD exploring what makes an effective and culturally appropriate physical activity programme for Pacific people.
And as part of his doctorate, he also put what he learned into practice, running exercise classes based on the model in Dunedin and the Cook Islands.
For Ruhe, research is about creating this kind of impact. And he’s now taking that concept of impact wider, as he embarks on a postdoctoral project aiming to develop a tool to measure the actual impact of Pacific health research projects on the people being researched.
Positive impact
Late last year, the positive impact of Ruhe’s research on Pacific communities was recognised with a 20Twenties award, which celebrates the achievements of 20 young Otago alumni.
He says Pacific and Māori health is a “hot” area for research, but the goal is to shift from research for research’s sake to research that creates long-term benefits for the people involved.
“I think Pacific communities have the ability to sense who is doing good research and who’s in it for their own academic gain,” he says. But he says where this is research involving Māori in Aotearoa or Aborigines in Australia, the biggest issue is when the participants are aware that they’re solely the subjects of research, rather than partners in it.
Ruhe’s whakapapa connects to Ma’uke in the Cook Islands, as well as Ngāpuhi and Tūwharetoa. He was born in Aotearoa, but calls Ma’uke, where his mother’s family lives, “my favourite place in the world; that’s what I consider home”.
Through his paternal side, his Ngāpuhi marae is Parawhenua in Ōhaeawai, and he also connects to Tūwharetoa through his nan.
Growing up in Wellington, he was sports mad, primarily focused on playing rugby (he still plays premier rugby for Dunedin’s Alhambra-Union). He initially thought he would become a PE teacher and started studying for a bachelor of physical education degree at the university in 2013.
“[At school] the only thing that we were taught about doing PE is that you’ll use it to become a PE teacher or a sports trainer. So I was like, ‘Well, that’s a really cool way to teach people about the importance of health and wellbeing’, and that was the avenue I was thinking of.
“But then obviously when I started going through the degree, I was like, ‘It’s actually way broader than that, and there’s a lot of impact that you can have in other avenues’.”
He was intrigued by exercise physiology, and got a taste for research – and the tangible impact it can make – early on.
Falls prevention
In 2015, Ruhe undertook a 10-week Health Research Council-funded project during his summer break, investigating the risk of falls among elderly Pacific people, and their attitudes to falls prevention, such as their openness to adopting certain exercises to mitigate the risk of falling.
“I saw immediately that after I submitted my report, there was a curriculum change to one of the elderly [exercise] programmes within the Pacific community here in Dunedin that incorporated more strength and balance exercises. So I saw research actually makes a difference.”
During his honours study he dug into existing research to identify what a physical activity programme that would be sensitive and responsive to the needs of Pacific people could look like. His PhD then looked at putting that into practice, with the creation of Niu Movement.
It involved extensive consultation with Pacific Trust Otago, the Cook Islands Ministry of Health, and church ministers and community leaders in Dunedin and Rarotonga. Feedback was that a successful exercise programme needed to be fun, accessible and incorporate cultural elements.
He piloted the classes for Pacific people in Dunedin, before implementing the programme on a larger scale for 12 weeks in the Cook Islands. It got results: Participants showed significant reductions in blood pressure, waist and hip measurements, and recorded high levels of enjoyment and willingness to participate in future.
But “the coolest part”, he says, is the research provided evidence to back up the efficacy of culturally responsive exercise programmes, like the Cook Islands’ popular Aka’uka Time dance-fit classes.
Professor Rosalina Richards, co-deputy director of the Coastal Peoples Southern Skies Centre for Research Excellence at Otago, was one of Ruhe’s supervisors for his summer research on elderly falls, and has since collaborated with him on other projects.
The next generation
She says he is part of the next generation of Pacific research leaders who, as well as having strong skill sets, are deeply and authentically connected to their culture “and bring that unapologetically into their research work and their teaching”.
“If you know the answers are already in our communities – they’re with our elders, they’re with our families’ lived experiences, they’re with the proverbs and the teachings that have guided our people for generations – it does keep you humble as a researcher because it’s not about us.
“It’s about being someone who has the skills to be trusted with cultural knowledge and have the privilege to be able to surface some of that knowledge from our communities to our decision makers,” she says. “People like Troy walk in that space between our community expertise and our health and education systems.
“It’s a very powerful space but also a space where you’re naturally more humble because all you are is a messenger. You carry it, you try to translate it, you try to do the best you can to represent your community and uphold their mana and dignity.”
During his PhD, Ruhe also worked in policy, developing a physical activity strategy for the Cook Islands Ministry of Health and helping the nation’s Sports and National Olympic Committee to create its first physical activity policy.
He was also a physical activity specialist for World Health Organisation-funded projects undertaken in the Pacific.
More recently, he has been a research fellow at Va’a o Tautai – Centre for Pacific Health at Otago University, primarily looking at big data to explore health outcomes for Pacific children.
Funded by the Health Research Council, his postdoctoral fellowship kicked off in June. The project will analyse Pacific health research that has been undertaken over the past 20-plus years, and will canvass what impactful research looks like to people within Pacific communities, to help inform what future research is green-lit.
“I’ll continue pushing for a platform where the communities that we are ‘researching’ are actually the ones who are telling their own stories,” he says.
“Because I believe they have all the ideas – they know exactly what’s going to be needed for them to have flourishing wellbeing. We just need to continue providing that platform so that they can come out with those solutions.”
