Qualitative wānanga June 2022

It was wonderful to come together this week to reflect on our progress of our interviews with Māori & Pacific patients and whānau. We have been privileged to hear many moving stories and strong ideas for improving heart health care.  Coming together as a team is so important for how we work. We started the morning by sharing from our reflective research journals which led to giving each other tips on how we cope with hearing, at times, sad or frustrating accounts of the impact of cardiovascular disease on patients and whānau, and the suffering they may endure.

While the mood was reflective and sometimes pensive, there was time for joy and laughter in coming together, and of course sharing kai. We were very happy to meet in person, Senior Research Fellows, Dr Tua Taueetia-Su’a, who is based in Lower Hutt, and Dr Sione Vaka, who has recently returned from Tonga with the Pacific Medical Association team helping Tongans deal with the aftermath of the January volcanic eruption and tsunami. Both Tua and Sione have helped us immensely with conducting interviews in the Samoan and Tongan languages respectively. It was great to have our PhD candidates join us, and it was an opportunity for some of us to meet for the first time, Jess Hutchings, a Niue pharmacist who is embarking on her PhD research with the Manawataki Fatu Fatu programme.

Our Kaupapa for the day was to develop themes from our interviews and to take them to the next level of thought and analysis, looking more deeply at what underlies the stories our participants have told us. We’ve made a big step forward in analysing all the kōrero but it’s an ongoing process – we’re still interviewing people and we’re still refining our coding. A big thanks to our Senior Research Fellow, Dr Karen Brewer for leading the workshop, and all of our team who are working so hard to make our programme have a positive impact.