What is your role/profession currently?
Currently I am a surgical research fellow, so I am working towards my PHD, and my other role is I am a GP registrar.
What was your abstract presentation about at the PMA Conference for 2022, and why are you passionate about it?
I was presenting my systematic review which looked at factors influencing career choices in female medical students.
It was a direct follow on from a literature review that was done ten years previously, and I wanted to repeat it ten years after to see if any of the factors that influenced career choices for females in medicine had actually changed.
I found that no, none of the factors had really changed. Women still found surgery specifically to be unfriendly to women. There is still gender issues present, it is still a hard specialty, it is not conducive to having a family. The only new and positive factor that I did find was that if female medical students identified that if they could do research, that there was a potential for access to research, then they were more likely to pursue surgery as a career.
My PHD looks at how can we increase more Pacific students in surgery, so that was a systematic review that informed my study.
What are your aspirations for Pacific health?
To have Pacific health outcomes on par, or better than non-Pacific, and specifically I’m talking about non-Pacific, non-Māori, so, at the level of Pakeha or Palagi. Then from my perspective, to really push for medical education and the medical workforce, so that we are producing more and more Pacific doctors, and at the same level of proportion as we are in the population.
Also, not just pushing out more doctors but also distributing us in a way that we are not only in Primary healthcare, but we are also at tertiary levels, and staffed in specialties like surgery.
My dream for Pacific health is that if there’s any little girl out there who says “oh I want to be a doctor,” or “I want to be a surgeon,” we can say yes its possible, this is how we’ll help you get there.
So in that way, whatever our Pacific people go through at Primary healthcare, the journey all the way to tertiary, they will always see a brown face, and we deliver a service that’s relevant to Pacific. That’s my vision for Pacific health.
How did you find the conference last year?
It was great. There were so many people and it was really reassuring just to see so many health professionals and students being involved in the event. I will definitely be attending this year, I have just submitted my abstract and getting in to planning for it.