Mobile COVID project points a path to equity: Award for Whakatāne’s Te Puna Ora o Mataatua

COVID-19 set in motion health­care changes in the eastern Bay of Plenty that have been wel­comed by rural patients and won the providers an award.

Te Puna Ora o Mataatua is a Māori-led provider based in Whakatāne. For its COVID-19 swabbing station based in a campervan, it picked up the Minis­try of Health Equity Award at the Primary Healthcare Awards | He Tohu Mauri Ora in May.

The organisation won the award partly because the project was much more than a swabbing station. Staff ap­plied a whānau ora triage approach to assess people’s needs, addressing as many as possible. Counselling, medical consultations, kai, firewood, hygiene supplies, transport to and from the as­sessment sites and free prescriptions were among the needs met.

The service was popular. At Ruatahu­na, half the township’s 200 residents were swabbed at the first visit; similar turnouts occurred elsewhere.

Now there are plans to use the van for COVID-19 vaccination and to fit it out as a travelling medical clinic that can even provide dialysis and some chemotherapy.

Te Puna Ora o Mataatua chief exec­utive Chris Tooley says the organisation has been working on a more integrated model of care.

“The mobility just really took it to an­other level, because we are really par­ticular around meeting face to face within Māoridom.

“We came across people who had never seen doctors, who just weren’t engaged in health in any kind of way.

“Now that we’ve got them, we’ve got to keep them. We can’t let them drop off the radar again. If they respond to an integrated, mobile platform, then we’ve got to fight to make it happen, and sooner rather than later.”

Dr Tooley says the decision to go mobile was made after setting up COVID-19 swabbing services in Whakatāne in March last year. Al­though their territory stretches from Matatā to Murupara and from Lake Waikaremoana to Hicks Bay, no one from outlying areas was attending.

The awards judges praised the pro­ject’s focus on community and collabo­ration. “Their commitment to equity,” one wrote, “is demonstrated in how they responded in the first weeks of the pandemic in New Zealand. While oth­ers were changing processes to make sure the needs of most were met, Te Puna Ora o Mataatua reviewed their processes after one week to assess the impact on equity and then extensively collaborated across multiple different stakeholders to develop a pro-equity response just two weeks later.”

Dr Tooley says “equity” is about more than equity for Māori. His organisation focuses on that, but also on addressing the effects of deprivation and rural iso­lation, and the need for clinical equity, which can be affected by systematic bi­ases, gender-based prejudices and the inability to access a service.

The mobile swabbing-plus service re­ceived funding mainly from Bay of Plenty DHB, plus additional money from central government agencies.

Dr Tooley says the van eventually be­came the centrepiece of larger events.

“In Ruatahuna, when we were up there for surveillance [swabbing], all these other providers tagged along with us. We had a mini health expo going on.

“Someone had a barbecue going out in the courtyard, there was music, you had all these gazebos with different ser­vices being offered, and people were walking around and getting everything in one hit. It showed where healthcare needs to go.”

He has secured DHB operational funding for the planned mobile clinic, but not the capital funding needed for the van’s full, $500,000 medical fit-out, for which he is approaching various philanthropists and businesses.

In the Equity Award, National Hauo­ra Coalition’s Mana Kidz programme running in south Auckland schools was highly commended.

The category also had a third finalist, the coalition’s Mana Tū programme, which supports whānau living with type 2 diabetes.