Carrington units to be moved

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 10

Carrington units to be moved

PA Auckland Carrington Hospital’s controversial Maori health units will be moved, according to their organiser, Mr Te Pere Curtis. A series of meetings are being held between Maori people to decide how the units will be run. Mr Curtis, the hospital’s Maori health project manager, chaired the Maori advisory group, which suspended a health worker, Mrs ! Titewhai Harawira. “I am now manager of all of Carrington’s Maori health workers.. I started the project and am now here to clean it up,” Mr Curtis said yesterday. “The whare paia is the thrust of Maori health and to give it this emphasis it

will be put in the community, in tribal areas. “Being in a hospital it excludes exactly the people it has been set up for.”

Mr Curtis reports direct to Carrington Hospital’s manager, Mr Alan Greenslade, and aims to make the Maori units accountable. • .

"I am going to the silent majority to decide how Maori health shall be developed. I am not using the Treaty of Waitangi,” he said.

A review of people working in the units was being made. “Some of the volunteers should get paid for what they do. Others have no right to be here and if they come into the hospital I shall have them towed away.”