A Better Chance of Dying

Emma Espiner goes to Porirua to meet the Wallace whānau and hear about a night in ED that changed their lives.

Clarification: Kōkiri Marae is in Lower Hutt, not in Porirua as stated in the podcast

Trainee doctor and award-winning writer Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) introduces her new podcast and recalls the experience of being thrown in at the deep end while recording the very first interview.

By Emma Espiner

When you set out to do anything in Te Ao Māori you have to be prepared that it'll turn into something else. You are required to show up in an entirely different way, and to be open to challenging your views. This is how it was for us with this podcast. Our producer, seasoned broadcaster and podcast-maker Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions, sketched out themes for each episode right at the beginning of this journey. There would be a global Indigenous health piece, something about colonisation, maybe an ep of 'real life' in the hospital with the bleeps and whirrs of medical equipment and a voiceover from a clinician teacher elucidating the finer points of clinical examinations to their students.

All of that went out the window on day one. We met the Wallace whānau at their home in Porirua to talk about their experience of navigating the health system after Colin had a stroke while still in his fifties, six years ago. Listening to their story, it was like the world stopped turning. All the theoretical structure of our podcast conceived in our heads and drafted out on our laptops at Noelle's dining table in Auckland drifted away as we walked through each step in the Wallace's long and lonely pathway back to the present day. We saw every point at which our health system had let them down.

After that first morning, we stopped trying so hard to force the podcast into our structure. We followed the stories and drew on our relationships with people working on the front lines of health equity, allowing us to mine ideas more deeply and reflect on people's experiences in a more authentic way. This approach took us all over Aotearoa and left me promising everyone that I'd come back one day, wanting to stay with everyone we met and join them in whatever it was that they were doing - the midwife at Te Puia Hospital, the psychiatrist in Gisborne, the surgeon in Northland, the GP in Levin, my own whānau at home in Kuku…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details