Reclaiming a te ao Māori approach to injury recovery

Ngākau Oho, a progamme developed to support injury recovery through rongoā Māori, customary Māori ways of healing, has received $100,000 funding from ACC’s Innovation Fund, set up to support innovative healthcare service initiatives aimed at helping people recover from injury.

Ngākau Oho has been designed and is being co-led by a core team of three: Dr Tia Reihana (Ngāti Hine) lecturer in Dance Studies and Associate Dean of Māori and Pacific, Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland; Piripi Kirton-Morunga (Ngāpuhi), a romiromi (Indigenous healing) practitioner; and Dr Teah Carlson (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Porou), a kauapapa Māori researcher. It will also include several tangata whenua healers and health practitioners experienced in hauora, a Māori world view of health.

Located in Dance Studies in the Faculty of Creative Arts and industries, Ngākau Oho will provide a personalised recovery programme for 20 ACC clients and their whānau. In the process, the programme aims to reclaim and normalise rongoā Māori as a viable and everyday healthcare practice.

Recent efforts to address Māori health inequities across the health sector have focused on increasing the number of Māori health professionals and Māori access to culturally relevant rehabilitation services, says Dr Reihana.

“We’d argue that healthcare inequities will persist unless there is also a move towards attributing equal value to customary Māori forms of healing.”

Rongoā Māori is the traditional and holistic healing system that covers the physical, mental and emotional, social and spiritual.

Ngākau Oho will include online and in-person sessions and wānanga on rongoā Māori including the use of medicinal native plants, romiromi (body alignment), maramataka (lunar calendar relationality), meditation and mahi tinana (body movement).

Crucially the programme has been designed to include whānau, to explore and support whānau-based injury care. “It’s a move away from individualised healthcare to working more as a collective,” says Dr Reihana.
 

“It is important to reaffirm cultural identity and provide clients and their whānau with a space in which they don’t need to compromise their own beliefs to have their healthcare needs met.

“When Māori have a choice in their health and wellbeing journey, including knowledge of and access to rongoā Māori, we will have moved further on our journey of achieving equity.”

The programme will provide ACC with evidence-based insight on how rongoā Māori would be embedded within established healthcare services.

“We believe the approach we develop will be an innovation that can be used within the health system, and importantly, by Māori health practitioners, providers and whānau, helping ensure that rongoā Māori practices can be a real and easily accessed option for Māori in wellbeing and recovery,” says Dr Reihana.