Weaving the way to safety

The wahakura is credited with reducing infant mortality by 29 percent in recent years. But what is it exactly?

MAS Member Dr David Tipene-Leach tells us how he developed a woven flax bassinet, wahakura, that enables parents to safely bed-share with their little ones. 

Helping to make a change

Dr David Tipene-Leach's CV makes for some impressive reading.

These include his many roles in Māori primary public health, working with indigenous communities in Australia, training doctors in Micronesia, founding GP clinics in rural, often isolated communities, a role as chair of a Hawke's Bay Treaty of Waitangi claim, ground-breaking work to reduce type 2 diabetes and his role in Te Ora – the Māori Medical Practitioners Association he helped start in 1996, which will be partnering with MAS this year (more about this later). 

And that's before we even get to the many babies the 63-year-old has helped save with the revolutionary wahakura 'safe sleep' flax bassinet he created in 2005. 

Not bad for someone who, in his own words, "didn't really want to be a doctor".

"I can't remember having a burning passion for medicine growing up, but I was good at science and had a sense of social justice, so in my application for med school, I wrote about wanting to help make a change," says David from Napier, where he's been Professor of Māori and Indigenous Research at the Eastern Institute of Technology since 2017.

The change David had in mind was improving things for Māori. "The 1960s and 70s, when I was growing up, was a significant time for Māori in this country. We realised we weren't getting a fair deal and that something had to be done about it".

David's contribution was to join land marches and get involved in broader movements protesting the treatment of Māori by the rest of New Zealand society. 

David became so involved in these protests, in fact, that he failed the third year of his medical degree. "I was spending more time protesting than studying, so I had to repeat the third year." He didn't let a lack of funds put him off, though, asking the school's Dean himself to sponsor David's repeat year of study in return for Māori carvings that David completed one summer and that still hang in the university. 

David's journey for change

After graduating, David took over a clinic in Whakatāne, a one-doctor practice serving around 4,000 patients. It didn't go well. "I had all these great ideas about providing free care and doing things for the community, but I couldn't figure out how to pay the bills so eventually I shut it."

He then moved between public health, academia and general practice, including a 10-year stint when he worked in two od those areas at the same time: three days a week at a free clinic he established in Ruatoki, a town of around 1,000 in the Ureweras, and two days a week teaching Māori health at Auckland Medical School. 

It was in Ruatoki that David – of Ngāti Kere and Ngāti Manuhiri descent – learned te reo Māori. "I didn't grow up speaking Māori, but it was the first language in Ruatoki, so I became a fluent speaker by listening to my patients."

David also spent two years in Hawaii – "not the flash bit, way out in the middle of nowhere" – training residents of the Federated States of Micronesia to become doctors.