Reconnecting healing traditions with modern healthcare
Desiree Paul, a Registered Nurse Prescriber, Rongoā Māori Practitioner, and Master’s graduate in nursing, has dedicated nearly 30 years to a nursing career that extends beyond clinical care.
Growing up with her grandparents, she learned early on that caring for others was not just a duty but a natural part of life. Later, she nurtured them, her mother, and other whānau members through palliative care. Caring is deeply connected to a wide range of concepts like empathy, compassion, and human connection, and for Desiree it’s also deeply rooted in her culture, whakapapa, through traditional healing, and the legacies her tipuna (ancestors) bestowed upon her.
Desiree graduated with a Bachelor of Nursing in 1996 at just 20 years old and has worked across a range of nursing roles throughout her career. Since 2007, her role has expanded from specialising in a single area to supporting people across a range of long-term conditions including cardiac, diabetes, and respiratory care.
Through support from the Nursing Education and Research Foundation (NERF), Desiree has been able to continue postgraduate studies with the mindset of collaborating Rongoā Māori traditional healing with Western medicine – work she says is already making a difference within the communities she serves.
“I’m particularly grateful and proud to say that the Nursing Education and Research Foundation (NERF) grants assisted my professional academic development immensely. The support NERF has given me has been by far the greatest,” she says.
NERF funding supported her on a global stage, assisting her to attend the ‘Healing Our Spirit Worldwide’ conference in Vancouver in 2023, where 500 Māori joined other indigenous peoples from around the world, including First Nations peoples from Canada and Australia, to share knowledge and approaches to healing and wellbeing. It was, she says, “a once-in-a-lifetime indigenous culturally profound experience, I’ll never forget”.
Desiree says: “It was spectacular. I learnt a lot about other indigenous cultures and their struggles with the effects of colonisation – poverty, racism, loss of land, severe cultural erosion and systemic socioeconomic inequities.”
The experience strengthened her passion for improving health outcomes for Māori through culturally grounded healthcare.
“This has had a significant impact on my career, strengthening my commitment to one day re-establishing my grandfather’s hauora clinic in the Horowhenua region. In doing so, I hope to integrate Rongoā Māori traditional healing with Western medicine, give back to my own people, and support healing for people from all walks of life.”
That renewed drive and passion carried her through to her Master’s thesis – ‘What are the barriers and enablers of collaborating Rongoā Māori traditional healing and Western medicine within healthcare settings’ – which she completed while studying Rongoā Māori through Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and balancing her clinical nursing career and whānau.
Alongside financial support, Desiree says NERF also contributed to her academic development in other ways. Most recently, she attended a NERF-organised workshop on writing for academic publication, which came at a critical point of her Master’s paper, as she prepared to submit her thesis.
“I am very grateful to have received additional support at the final stages of my Master’s project through NERF.”
Desiree graduated from E.I.T in Napier earlier this year and now works as a Registered Nurse Prescriber, providing advanced care within her community while continuing her practice as a Rongoā Māori practitioner.
She says the support she received through NERF and other scholarship providers played a major role in helping her reach this point of her nursing career.
Her journey is deeply connected to her whānau history and the healing traditions passed down through generations. She describes reconnecting with the legacy of her grandfather, James Joseph Tukapua, a respected healer from Muaūpoko tribe, whose work supported whānau, hapū and iwi, which in-turn has inspired her own pathway into healthcare and Rongoā Māori traditional healing practices.
Looking ahead, she plans to publish her thesis and begin Nurse Practitioner training next year – extending her reach further into the communities she has dedicated her life to serving.
For NERF, stories like Desiree’s demonstrate the wider impact scholarships and grants can have – not only supporting individual nurses, but strengthening leadership, innovation and culturally responsive healthcare across Aotearoa, New Zealand.
“He aha te mea nui o te ao? (What is the most important thing in the world?)
Māku e kī atu, (I will tell you,)
He tangata, he tangata, (It is people, it is people)
He tangata” (It is people”)
“WHIRIA TE TĀNGATA” – signifies the importance of unity, collaboration, and bringing people from all walks of life together.
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