Kerri Nuku, Kaiwhakahaere
NZNO Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa

Hate has been dominating the headlines over the past week both here in Aotearoa and across Te Tai-o-Rēhua.

In Australia, two pro-Palestine nurses lost the plot by threatening to kill Israeli patients. In Aotearoa, followers of Destiny Church lost the plot by pushing members of the rainbow community.

Let’s also not forget that our country’s health system is not hate-free. Many nurses, midwives and healthcare workers have shared with me their experiences of racism and hate in the health system.  We don’t know about a lot of them because they were not caught on video, but they experience them first hand.
There are lessons from these incidents that all healthcare workers in Aotearoa can learn from.

And that is, that no matter how much we disagree with someone else’s views or lifestyles, we must not fall into the hate that the political environment across the globe is triggering.

We’ve sworn to care for all the sick the vulnerable and the ill regardless of their race, creed, religion and culture.

The antisemitic incident in Australia does not change our position to oppose the horrific loss of life in Gaza, including the killing of on health workers and the bombing of hospitals, which even the United Nations has have described as crimes against humanity.

The behaviour of Destiny Church followers does not change our position to give LGBTQI+ the same opportunities and care that everyone deserves.

An important reminder of the late Irihapeti Ramsden’s work around cultural safety, as she addressed the notions of power and relationships, she also redressed the important of the tradition and contemporary powerful interchange of words.

I will leave you with these words from Irihapeti Ramsden to suitably change the old nursing philosophy to become appropriate for the end of the 20th century and onward to the 21st.

By changing words from “irrespective of difference” to “respective (respect) of difference” in healthcare the objective of nurses to give appropriate service delivery can be achieved (Ramsden, 1990a, p. 35).

Nursing continues to hold a privileged position in the lives of people who access health services.