Health researcher appointed
The newest staff member at EIT is a professor who hails from Porangahau in CHB.
Widely acclaimed for his achievements in promoting Ma¯ori health, David Tipene-Leach is EIT’s newlyappointed Professor of Ma¯ori and Indigenous Research.
“Moving out of clinical practice is a huge change and Iwill miss patient care. However, the opportunities at EIT are endless,” said Professor Tipene-Leach, who, for the last 10 years was a general medical practitioner with Hauora Heretaunga at Te Taiwhenua o Heretaunga.
Professor Tipene-Leach, of Nga¯ti Kahungunu descent from Po¯rangahau, is a fluent speaker of te reo Ma¯ori and well-versed in tikanga.
As a senior lecturer in Ma¯ori health at the University of Auckland’s Medical School from 1987 to 2001, he developed and taught undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Ma¯ori health. He also taught for two years at the University of Hawaii at the Ma¯noa Pacific Basin Medical Officers programme.
His academic research interests over this 13-year period included long term conditions and the prevention of SIDS (cot death).
Keen to return to the community, he moved to Te Taira¯whiti to head the Puhi Kaiti Community Health Centre in Gisborne for Nga¯ti Porou Hauora.
This move was the catalyst for developing the East Coast Nga¯ti and Healthy Prevent Diabetes research project with the University of Otago. Later it triggered his pioneering work in preventing Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI) with the development of the wahakura, awoven flax bassinet, and further research around sudden infant death.
The subsequent Safe Sleep programme, which includes the wahakura’s ‘little sister’ — the plastic Pe¯pi-Pod— has been credited with decreasing infant mortality by 30 per cent in the last six years. Enabling safe bed-sharing, both are widely used for babies up to six months of age, when the risk of SUDI is greatest.
“This is possibly my best piece of work— taking a hugely disparate health problem (dead babies) and working with weavers and Ma¯ori midwives to develop a kaupapa Ma¯ori answer to the problem.”
Professor Tipene-Leach has served on the Advisory Committee on Primary Health Care, the Alcohol Advisory Council, the National Child and Youth Mortality Committee, the Health Bay Transitional Primary Health Organisation Board and Hawke’s Bay District Health Board’s Clinical Council.
He was the founding chairman of Te Ora, the Ma¯ori Medical Practitioners Association, and as chairman of He Toa Takitini for the last four years he led the Heretaunga Tamatea Treaty of Waitangi claim through to last September’s signing of the Deed of Settlement— a resolution that will be worth $125 million to the iwi.
With his partner Dr Sally Abel, Professor Tipene-Leach moved to Hawke’s Bay in 2007 when he took up his Te Taiwhenua o Heretaunga appointment. The couple have worked since on health research contracts, published research papers and attracted awards for contributing to local Ma¯ori health.
In 2006, he received the Ma¯ori Medical Practitioners’ Ma¯rire Goodall award. In 2015, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship in the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine and, a year later, a Distinguished Fellowship of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.
In his EIT role, Professor Tipene-Leach will work to establish research projects pursuing local interests, postsettlement projects in Hawke’s Bay and teach a postgraduate programme in Ma¯ori health.