Trainee doctor Emma Espiner introduces her new podcast Getting Better - A Year in the Life of a Māori Medical Student.

Trainee doctor and award-winning writer Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) travels to the front lines of healthcare in New Zealand, where life and death decisions are made every day and where the statistics clearly show Māori are suffering: Māori die younger, get chronic illnesses earlier and receive less care than non-Māori.

We'll hear from whānau whose experiences are the real-life stories behind the statistics and doctors who see first-hand the racism that has led to our acceptance of "unequal outcomes"- in the real world, "unequal outcomes" means sickness and death.

Finally, we'll look at the COVID-19 crisis, which underlined the governments' ability to act when it's not just Māori at risk of dying too soon. Does that mean that Māori dying early is just business as usual?

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Emma Espiner goes to Porirua to meet the Wallace whānau and hear about a night in ED that changed their lives.

Clarification: Kōkiri Marae is in Lower Hutt, not in Porirua as stated in the podcast

Trainee doctor and award-winning writer Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) introduces her new podcast and recalls the experience of being thrown in at the deep end while recording the very first interview.

By Emma Espiner

When you set out to do anything in Te Ao Māori you have to be prepared that it'll turn into something else. You are required to show up in an entirely different way, and to be open to challenging your views. This is how it was for us with this podcast. Our producer, seasoned broadcaster and podcast-maker Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions, sketched out themes for each episode right at the beginning of this journey. There would be a global Indigenous health piece, something about colonisation, maybe an ep of 'real life' in the hospital with the bleeps and whirrs of medical equipment and a voiceover from a clinician teacher elucidating the finer points of clinical examinations to their students.

All of that went out the window on day one. We met the Wallace whānau at their home in Porirua to talk about their experience of navigating the health system after Colin had a stroke while still in his fifties, six years ago. Listening to their story, it was like the world stopped turning. All the theoretical structure of our podcast conceived in our heads and drafted out on our laptops at Noelle's dining table in Auckland drifted away as we walked through each step in the Wallace's long and lonely pathway back to the present day. We saw every point at which our health system had let them down.

After that first morning, we stopped trying so hard to force the podcast into our structure. We followed the stories and drew on our relationships with people working on the front lines of health equity, allowing us to mine ideas more deeply and reflect on people's experiences in a more authentic way. This approach took us all over Aotearoa and left me promising everyone that I'd come back one day, wanting to stay with everyone we met and join them in whatever it was that they were doing - the midwife at Te Puia Hospital, the psychiatrist in Gisborne, the surgeon in Northland, the GP in Levin, my own whānau at home in Kuku…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

For her GP placement, Emma asked to go to Northland. She's on the road with rural doctor Kyle Eggleton, whose weekly clinic is in the remote outpost of Tuparehuia.

Emma went to Northland for her GP placement in order to work alongside Dr Kyle Eggleton. He describes what's involved in working as a doctor for a Māori health provider.

By Dr Kyle Eggleton

I am a general practitioner, but I am not a general practitioner, I am not allowed to be. It is a bit confusing trying to explain this contradiction to patients. I end up saying that the contract that I work under doesn't fund full general practice services. Patients still don't understand this and when they are asked who their GP is, they say that it is me. I don't argue with this pronouncement, but do feel that my profession is something else, something undefined in Pākehā words.

For a start I don't think that the work that I do is typical general practice work. I don't have a single clinic, but work in a different place every day. It might be a freezing room bolted to the outside of a community hall, or a rural first aid post where faded handwritten posters lists the telephone numbers of volunteers, or it could be in the back of a van where patients and I perform an elaborate dance negotiating the plinth and desk bolted to the floor. Despite the diversity in location the clinics are bound together in the amazing beauty of their surroundings, the warmth and community spirit of the patients that attend them and the whakapapa links to Ngātiwai.

There are other things that make the work I do less typical of general practice. My standard consultation is 20 minutes, a little longer than the 15 minutes I used to do when I worked in my own practice. Partially the longer times reflect the need to unpack the complexities in a patient's life. Psychological, social and economic issues are intertwined with the biological and are often best dealt with a whānau ora approach and the expertise of other colleagues. On other days I feel like I am an agnostic minister of religion as I tease out spiritual influences that cause a patient's mouth to quiver and their eyes to dull. I often can't solve these problems, but asking and knowing sometimes helps a patient to find solutions themselves. These intertwined aspects of a person is more than health, it relates to wellness…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details