There are numerous ways in which the Covid 19 response failed Māori. In this post I use Ministry of Health figures for Covid 19 deaths to explain why inequities for Māori are obscured in the publicly available data.

It is a privilege to support this mahi:

University of Auckland Staff to Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater: "[R]everse your decision and to offer your full support to students and staff who may choose to exercise their right to protest by establishing a peaceful encampment on campus grounds" 🇵🇸 https://t.co/HzTowQhLr5

I see they've now opened up more non member tix. I had a hard time finding any overlap between the NZ Tech member companies and Māori Tech companies featured in the Toi Hangarau report

Received an email two hours ago about "Bridging the participation gap of Māori in Aotearoa’s tech sector"... but there are zero remaining tickets for people who aren't already members of NZ Tech. How about we start there??

Incidentally, here is a model trained on historical surgical data that does quantify a health equity gap: https://t.co/jyXYE8yaxy. Check the BJS article for details. 4/4

that shows that ethnicity as a factor _does_ correlate with longer time-to-surgery even though it ought not to. In the meantime, a lot of poor commentary is filling an information vacuum. 3/4

and--independently of that--ethnicity, then that would help provide a data-driven argument for justifying the criteria and the weightings. If that was the case, the response to claims that “ethnicity ought not to influence clinical decisions” would be to point to the model 2/4

It would be very useful if more technical details of the Equity Adjustor Score were made public. If it uses models based on historical surgical wait time data found that longer wait times were positively correlated with factors like remote location and deprivation rating 1/4

The use of this tool for election-year race-baiting has been disgusting. And unfortunately the public detail of how the score was developed is minimal. But there is potential to keep discussing these important matters and keep moving toward eliminating these inequities. 11/11

"These latter areas have got to be our focus, but the surgical wait list issues can be the leverage for the real action on these. Simply being successful in getting prioritised waiting lists happening is nowhere near enough on its own.” 10/n

"but this area of disadvantage is small compared to the magnitude of inequities generated by the social determinants of health, barriers to primary care access, later diagnosis, attrition across clinical pathways and necessary comorbidity management. 9/n

when gauged by the measure of overall average times to surgery. In the same report, Snedden also noted that the surgical wait times are only one element of achieving equity. “We know that there are elective surgical inequities and they need to be managed 8/n

But this still wouldn’t address the earlier causes of this inequity, for example inaccessible or unaffordable appointments, or issues due to longer wait times for specialist appointments. But it may dampen the effects of some of these earlier issues--for those who remain-- 7/n

All other things being equal, the longer the general population average waitlist times for elective surgeries, the more of an impact this approach would have on reducing something like average wait times for Māori and Pasifika. 6/n

Now, imagine a hypothetical world where there was no wait time for elective surgeries(!). In that situation, the Equity Adjustor Score method would not have any effect in compensating for inequities for surgical wait times. 5/n

Use of the Equity Adjustor Score for prioritising surgical scheduling is like controlling the order of traffic on a bridge to make up for differences in distances that had to be travelled leading up to that bridge. 4/n

in his 2020 report: “Our data shows Māori and Pasifika patients take longer to move from referral to listing for procedure and often have to present multiple times during the pathway and have a higher DNA (did not attend) rate across the pathway.” 3/n

reaching the other side of that bridge. On this analogy, Māori and Pasifika patients on average have a longer journey and rockier road to even get to the bridge and some may not even complete that journey. Then Auckland District Health Board Chair Pat Snedden wrote 2/n

The path to the surgical waitlist is not the same for everyone—there are inequities for Māori and Pasifika. An analogy would be a network of roads (the pathway to the surgical waitlist) that lead to a bridge (the surgical waitlist) where the surgery is represented by 1/n

Join the Centre of Machine Learning for Social Good (ML4SG) National Hui. The free event will be on Friday 23 June 2023 from 1-4pm. Visit the link to register https://t.co/LjxNFkpsln Any Questions? Email: ogra439@aucklanduni.ac.nz #MachineLearning #NewZealand