Nurse manager wants governance role

AVAILABLE: Clinical nurse leader Wendy Stanbrook-Mason is standing for Whanganui District Health Board. PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO

It's been a while since Whanganui District Health Board had a staff member on the board - but Wendy Stanbrook-Mason can see value in it.

For the last three years she's been the clinical nurse leader for Whanganui Hospital medical wards, with charge nurses reporting to her. She also gets to talk to other staff, patients and their families, is on Faith City School's board of trustees and is working on a masters degree in management.

She's standing for the board because she wants to keep her hospital job and take on a governance role as well. Previous staffers who've been board members are Clive Solomon and PJ Faumui, and current board member Judith MacDonald is a former staffer.

A staff member on the board would be an asset, she said.

"I think I would bring an understanding of systems and processes. I know that's not the board's brief, but it could be a bonus with governance."

Mrs Stanbrook-Mason's involvement with health started when she was a 15-year-old volunteer helping older people in the former Newcombe Ward. She trained as a nurse in Taranaki and did most of her placements at Whanganui Hospital.

After training she worked for six months in a Thai refugee camp, before getting a job in the hospital's emergency department. She was there for eight years, with nursing stints in Cambodia and Australia, before taking on a series of management roles.

She endorses the whanau ora approach to health - putting patients and their families first, and wants the new board to maintain that momentum. And she has a special interest in health for older people with dementia.

Whanganui District Health Board has a lot of challenges, she said, in providing for an elderly and low socio-economic population. But it deserves congratulations for cutting its budget deficit without cutting any services.

One of the next challenges will be to meet government's strategy of moving health provision increasingly out of hospitals and into the community.

"How do we transition that without the community feeling services are being reduced?"

It's going to require lots of co-operation, but she said staff are up for it.

"I see some of the innovation and creativity that our staff have, if you give them a challenge in the best interest of consumers and the community."