When it comes to hard work and serving the community to help make a difference, Dr Matire Harwood is your wāhine.
Dr Matire Harwood. Photo: Supplied
And this week her peers thought so too, with Dr Harwood (Ngāpuhi) receiving a service medal from the Royal New Zealand College of GPs, for her services toward Māori health during the Covid-19 pandemic.
She only had six days off in 2021, juggling her role as a GP in Papakura, but also her research work at the University of Auckland and all the other advisory and advocacy groups she is part of.
She told RNZ she was genuinely surprised at the accolade.
"Working right through Christmas and New Year's and not being able to spend time with my family, wanting to do the best that you could, not thinking that you're going to be rewarded for it in any way like this but to get to the end of it and have your peers recognise you for that mahi is truly uplifting," Harwood said.
Throughout the pandemic, she drove Papakura Marae's outreach and vaccination efforts; she also helped set up vaccination buses that traversed the streets of South Auckland, going mobile to deliver thousands of vaccines.
For one of marae's vaccination drives, she had a list of 600 people to ring and managed to get hold of 480 of them; of those, more than 350 went to the marae to get vaccinated.
"We went to one of the clinics in South Auckland and identified everybody who was eligible but had not yet had the Covid vaccine and made attempts to contact them, just answer any questions or concerns they may have had on the phone, and then invite them down to the marae," said Dr Harwood.
It was those initiatives that drove up initially lagging Māori and Pacific vaccination rates. But also efforts they had to fight to get support for.
During another vaccination drive, she said her team managed to vaccinate more people in just a few hours than many other, more well-publicised, events.
The vaccination centre at Papakura Marae. Photo: RNZ / Te Aniwa Hurihanganui
"We did a different type of thing down in Manurewa where we took a bus into a couple of communities, went door knocking and just said 'hey, we're here we can answer questions for you and happy to sit with you while you have the vaccine'.
"We had an ice cream truck there, a coffee truck and whānau were getting vaccinations altogether," Harwood said.
But with this mahi has come wit the stress of seeing more and more whānau falling ill; first with Covid-19, then the flu, then other preventable illnesses that afflict many of this country's poorest. It is made worse with not enough staff to help.
"We have also been unwell and have had to take time off for our families that are unwell and we're having to stay home and look after them. So it's been incredibly difficult and challenging for all GPs around the country and for most of our hospital colleagues as well," Harwood said.
Yesterday, Minister of Health Andrew Little announced a government plan to boost the number of health workers, which includes efforts to bolster the Māori health workforce.
A joint project with the Royal New Zealand College of GPs will increase the number of GPs trained each year from 200 to 300.
Dr Matire Harwood says the government needs to find solutions to ease the workload for GPs. Photo: Supplied
"We know we need to grow the number so we don't want to limit ourselves, and we know that Te Aka Whai Ora through the work they're doing even now has ambitions for a number of programs to get more Māori into the health workforce," Little said.
He also said Te Aka Whai Ora - The Māori Health Authority has a specific role in growing and supporting Māori healthcare workers.
Harwood said that was welcome, but the pain was being felt now. The government also needed to think of short-term solutions to help ease the workload for burnt-out GPs.
"Bringing people in to support the system I think will be really critical right now in this next month, two months to give us some relief and to know that the strategies, the policies, that are going to be put in place, we can actually see tangible outcomes from those."
As part of the government's long-term and medium-term solutions, she said support for Māori and Pasifika needed to start in school, helping with subjects to get them into medical school.
She said addressing poverty in lower socio-economic areas would help ease stress at her clinic at Papakura Marae.
"I think it's got to start with living wage, improving opportunities for our kids to get into schools and further education after that. Those sorts of things are definitely going to help and take some of that strain off what we're seeing in our clinic.
"I think improving support for mental health and addiction is also going to be critical in our area... I'm seeing more and more people in the clinic with these sorts of health issues. So having some support in those areas would be really useful."