99 | Dr. Hinemoa Elder on non-profit mahi and Māori child & adolescent psychiatry

Dr. Hinemoa Elder (Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi) is a Māori child and adolescent psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. She works at Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland and deputy psychiatry member of the NZ Mental Health Review Tribunal. She became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori and to Psychiatry in 2019.  Dr. Elder has written two best selling books – Aroha and Wawata and joins us today to kōrero about her journey today. 

She has a PhD in Public Health (2012)  in which she developed tools for Māori whānau (extended families) with Traumatic Brain Injury and was also the recipient of a Health Research Council of NZ Eru Pomare Post Doctoral Fellowship. The approaches she developed are used in rehabilitation in the community. She continues to work in TBI and dementia research. She received the MNZM for services to Māori and to Psychiatry in 2019. She is an invited member of the Busara Circle, a group of senior international women leaders which forms a critical support for the Homeward Bound project, a global leadership programme for women in science, of which she is an alumni, travelling to Antarctica with the project in 2019. Dr Elder is a Board member of The Helen Clark Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy think tank which generates public policy research and debate. She is a board member of the RANZCP Foundation. Dr Elder is the Patron of ’Share my Super” a charity aimed at ending child poverty in NZ. Dr Elder has written two best seeling books published by Penguin Random House. “Aroha. Māori wisdom for a contented life lived in harmony with our planet’, was named on the Oprah Winfrey Book club in 2021.  ‘Wawata. Daily wisdom guided by Hina the Māori moon, is currently the number one best selling non-fiction book in NZ. Dr Elder is also regularly invited to give keynote presentations. She was an invited speaker to the Rhodes Healthcare Forum, Oxford University in 2019. Hinemoa has a background in theatre and dance. She performed in a NZ play at the Edinburgh Festival, Assembly Rooms in 1986. She is a past Chair of Auckland Theatre Company Trust and the inaugural Chair of Te Taumata a Iwi The Arts Foundation. Hinemoa also worked in NZ childrens' television in the early 1990s.

In this episode, we discuss her journey from television presenting to medicine, her own experiences in the medical system with her māmā, her journey into psychiatry,  and the numerous non-profit organisations and her involvement - including Busara Circle, The Helen Clark Foundation, and Share my Super. We talk about looking after ourselves as doctors, but also the importance of seeing the bigger picture and public health involvement. We brush on topics of intersectional feminism and evidence-based practice, and how we can do more to empower our own medical wāhine. We discuss her passion for theatre performance and her multiple accolades in the creative world.

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