Bloomfield thanked by public, staff
Dr Ashley Bloomfield says he’s had dozens of emails and letters from members of the public since he made the announcement to step down.
The Director-General of Health was in Nelson visiting health providers last Friday.
‘‘I’ve had a lot of letters and emails right through the pandemic thanking our team,’’ he said. Asked if it felt like a weight off his shoulders after he announced in April his decision to step down, he said: ‘‘It does’’.
‘‘I think about it as like the decision to get married, you know, it’s not the wedding, it’s the decision ... so I do feel a weight has lifted a bit, but I am very focused. I’ve got three months to go, I’ve got work to do.’’
Responding to rumours he had plans to settle in Nelson, Bloomfield said he already had a connection to the region as he had a bach in the Nelson Lakes area, so was in the region quite often.
‘‘We’ll just see, we’re not sure exactly what we are going to do next.’’
In a meeting with Te Piki Oranga, Māori health provider at the top of the south, Bloomfield said the Government was adamant it wanted to maintain and continue the investment in hauora providers that had been funded over the past two years.
Kaimahi (staff) thanked Bloomfield for his work in keeping the country safe.
‘‘I think we were lucky, but it’s the old saying isn’t it, ‘the harder I work, the more luck I have’, and there’s a huge amount of hard work behind it,’’ he said.
Bloomfield said the first communities to mobilise in the pandemic were Māori, because ‘‘they knew, first hand, what had happened 100 years before, and at the marae there were still urupā with whānau who had died in that (1918) pandemic’’. Māori didn’t want that to happen again.
Health providers had to respond with speed. ‘‘Sometimes we sprang some decisions on you, my team talks about even then saying, ‘We knew you were going to be doing this at one o’clock, when you announced it on the podium’, and I’d say, well to be fair, the Prime Minister only told me five minutes before on the lift on the way down from her office to the Beehive.’’
When Delta struck, New Zealand’s ‘‘vulnerable and marginalised communities became really obvious to us’’.
In Auckland, that was people who were homeless or living in vehicles.
In the Waikato, ‘‘the outbreak there was for a long time amongst people who used methamphetamine, with addiction issues’’.
‘‘Our health services and public health services, our hauora providers and our Pasifika providers learnt how to
‘‘I do feel a weight has lifted a bit.’’ Dr Ashley Bloomfield
reach into these communities. We have to capture and remember that learning.’’
Bloomfield said from the quarterly data he pored over, he could see it was not true that Māori were not as committed to getting their tamariki vaccinated. Rather it was finding the whānau who were more likely to be shifting homes.
‘‘Our Māori and maybe Pasifika whānau are more likely to be moving around – their housing circumstances might be different, so the challenge for us is to find these whānau who want to vaccinate their tamariki,’’ he said.
‘‘Missing out on those MMR vaccinations is where the problem is, and we just need to target our efforts.’’
Staff raised issues of pay parity. Bloomfield acknowledged that, and said the biggest disparity was between those employed by hauora providers and DHBs.