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

Joint Public Health Champion 2001  -  Judith Reinken

Born in New York City, Judith Reinken was brought up in rural New Hampshire before studying mathematics at Ohio University and theology at a Massachusetts seminary. She worked for the American navy and department of justice as a mathematician and earned her PhD at the University of Chicago in "west Semitic linguistics" (the Old Testament).

From this varied and somewhat unlikely background, Judith Reinken has become one of New Zealand's foremost advocates of public health and champions of community development.

Judith and her husband Donald moved to New Zealand, because she says "we are intelligent," and Donald says, "Because it looked like it might be the last remaining country on the earth where the police and public still talked to each other."

Judith and Donald lived in Wellington for 18 years where Judith was first an "unhappy systems analyst" then a biostatistician/epidemiologist for the former Department of Health when George Salmond was Director General.

Judith Reinken worked with George Salmond and others in Porirua, north of Wellington, assessing the access to health services of the poor. Their conclusion was that the more affluent, paradoxically, have better access to government health services than the poor. Their work led to the development of the New Zealand Deprivation Index which uses census data to map pockets of deprivation on which resource allocation is based.

In 1985, her book Health and Equity was published. It has been described as "a brave critique of private medicine and an analysis of neighbourhood level differences in health status."

A disagreement with George Salmond's successor in 1986 saw Dr Reinken eventually leave the public service and set up, with Bridget Allan, a consultancy firm researching issues including smoking and passive smoking, poverty and health, access to health services and research and general practice.

In 1988, her book The Big Kill: The Human Cost of Smoking was published, paving the way for government policy shifts.

In a reverse of the norm, the head office of Judith's consultancy business was the Hokianga, with Wellington the branch office. For years, she traveled to the Hokianga from Wellington every two weeks out of every two months and she and Donald moved there permanently in 1989.

After her arrival in the Hokianga, Judith quickly became a key public health advocate and was the catalyst for the formation of Hauora Hokianga Trust, the first community-owned provider of health services in the post-reform era.

As a Trustee, Judith has blended her epidemiology and advocacy skills to widen the brief of the health trust into such matters as a pioneering dental service, a sexual health service, and contesting reduced ferry services across the harbour.

Her statistical research led to a comparative analysis of census versus Hokianga Health registrations which demonstrated that official statistics cannot be relied on as the sole information source for health service funding. Eventually North Health accepted this analysis and adjusted upwardly Hokianga's funding accordingly.

Although officially retired, Dr Reinken is a member of the Auckland PHA Committee, and she is embarking on yet another career direction - documentary making. This has her busy learning how to edit.

But she has what she describes as "obsessive research disorder" and for her, sheer bliss remains a day uninterrupted in the Auckland University Library.