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The PHA - an informed, collaborative and strong advocate for public health.

Public Health Champion 2005  -  Ann Shaw

Academics, doctors, lecturers and researchers have been declared public health champions, but the 2005 champion, Ann Shaw, is the first nurse to be honoured.

Starting out as a Plunket nurse in the 1960s, Ann Shaw became assistant matron at Dannevirke Hospital in the early 70s, and then district Plunket nurse in Manawatu, moving to Gisborne in 1983.

After working in The Priority Area programme targeting adolescents, she combined the role of Principal Public Health Nurse and Health Promotion Manager for the Tairawhiti Area Health Board moving into the push for smokefree environments, among other things.

It was at this time that Tairawhiti Netball Association and Football Association were the first in the country to become smokefree. Ann says her teams provided the impetus for the sports associations to make their own moves.

And this goes to the heart of her philosophy about improving the health of New Zealanders which is that communities, given the necessary support and information, should decide for themselves what needs to done and how it will be achieved. It shouldn't, Ann says, be some bureaucrat far distant from those communities deciding what the problem is and what solution will be formulated to address it.

In 1998, Ann Shaw returned to Palmerston North as health promotion co-ordinator for BreastScreen Coast to Coast, one of the regional BreastScreen Aotearoa programmes covering the Taranaki, Wanganui, MidCentral, Hawkes Bay and Tairawhiti DHBs - an area extending from Taranaki through to Gisborne. It's a role she holds to this day.

Ann is a passionate supporter of the view that health must be viewed in its holistic dimensions as an aspect of everyday living. She hates the idea that the symbols of health to many people are hospitals and ill-health care services only. She says health must also include the wider dimensions of housing, education, transport, employment and environment for the benefit of the whole population - now and future generations.

She says epidemiology has much to answer for in making everyday living problematic. She explains, "If you look only at ill health, you will get only ill health." She says for example that everyday parenting should be supported instead of waiting for it to go awry, then trying to 'cure' it.

Ann says the country no longer values the family as it did during the 1950s, saying the family has value to the economy of the country. She particularly wants the focus to be on New Zealand’s young.

She believes the user pays direction of the 1990s devalued children who were neither voters nor producers of wealth and the damage from that, which came on quickly, is taking a long time to repair. As an example, she says student loans with their initial high interest rates would never have been introduced in a country which valued its young or realised they were its future.

Ann believes it is absolutely crucial that public health is acknowledged as the most important thing underlying the economy of the country. She is pessimistic however, that that realisation will take hold any time soon. She says the provider-funder split between DHBs and the Ministry of Health leaves a vacuum where no one takes responsibility. She mistrusts bureaucracy when it gets as big as it has and believes health should not “sit in a ministry” which flip-flops from one World Bank suggestion to another. She says there also needs to be a prolonged commitment from a department which can work on long term strategies supporting health determinants safe from three year election cycles.

Ann Shaw says watching others she has mentored blossom is the most satisfying thing she has experienced in her work, but this grandmother of five believes her greatest achievement is her three children who have become a nurse, a doctor and a teacher. She hopes the world will be a better place because of them.

And as for her work, she continues to shuttle between Manawatu, Taranaki and Gisborne, spreading the word about health promotion and facilitating communities finding their own solutions to health issues.

Ann Shaw says the overwhelmingly positive nature of her work means she has the best job in the world and that she has no intention of ever retiring!