March 14, 2022
Health workforce plan showing results
The head of Te Rau Ora says she can look back on its first 20 years with a sense of the job being done well.
Maria Baker says the Māori health workforce development agency, originally known as Te Rau Matatini, grew out of the report by Judge Ken Mason on the mental health and addiction system which identified a critical lack of Māori workers and programmes.
Working with Massey University it has developed programmes to build up not only the workforce but governance across the whole health sector.
“There’s a whole lot more Māori working across the health and social services, care kind of system, so much so when we look at the data, the Māori workforce has grown faster than the non-Māori workforce and sure, there are still inequalities and challenges that remain in the system but if we look back 20 years and where we are now, we’re in some pretty good spaces,” Dr Baker says.
She says a whakaaro of Te Rau Ora is that whānau Māori are the workforce.