DHB candidate Hohaia ready to tame ‘the beast’ of a system

Te Aroha Hohaia is ready to throw a spanner in the works in her next term on the Taranaki District Health Board.

Hohaia was one of the four appointed members on the board in this past term, however she has decided to stand for election in October.

The roles are the same - everyone was accountable to the Minister of Health and they shared equal responsibliity as members, she said, however there was different sense of pride which came with being elected rather than with being appointed.

‘‘It was an endorsement of skills. So someone else saying we have confidence in this person and so there’s mana that goes with that. But there’s also, I’ve got this perception there’s mana in being endorsed by other people, our region, our communities across Taranaki.’’

There are 29 candidates vying for the seven elected members’ seats at this year’s elections.

It took Hohaia a while to wrap her head around the health system and what the board was trying to achieve, but she said if elected, she would dive into the role with a lot of momentum.

‘‘Health in itself is a beast as a system - I struggled with connecting the dots between those national priorities, national directives to our local lived life and what it meant on a local basis.’’

Hohaia lives in Hawera and said one of her goals as a board member was to try and have services closer to home, for all of Taranaki. She said it was difficult for patients, or people with young families to have to travel from South Taranaki into New Plymouth, or people from Taranaki having to travel to Waikato for treatments.

She supported tele-consulting and tele-health having a bigger role in the system. Additionally preventative health strategies were important to look at, with an ageing population but no extra funding available to cope with greater health demands.