July 23, 2020
Health officials skip ethnicity data step
New National Party health spokesperson says the Health Ministry is failing to collect the ethnicity data it needs to make good decisions, especially about COVID-19.
Shane Reti drew that conclusion from asking new Heath Minister Chris Hipkins to confirm a news report the majority of those offloaded from an overbooked Air New Zealand flight from Brisbane were Māori.
He thought he could get to the bottom of the story by asking what was revealed from the data collected when those people were eventually put in managed isolation and issued a national health index number.
He was told ethnicity was an optional input to the NHI and was not needed for testing or managed isolation.
"You’ve got to be joking. How are we ever going to tell if Māori and Pasifika and others are being well looked after and well served if that's not recorded if they are in managed isolation? When the coronavirus outbreak first happened there were a number of Māori academics who pointed out to the ministry they weren't collecting ethnicity data so they did fix it for a bit, we could see where the testing was happening, but I think they have fallen back into bad habits, and that does bother me," Dr Reti says.
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