Kiwi woman says listing herself as Māori cut health wait from eight months to 10 Days

A subscriber who asked to be identified only as Rose* has contacted me with an account that raises uncomfortable questions about how ethnicity is being used in New Zealand’s public healthcare system.

Rose, who is New Zealand European, says that after waiting eight months for a diagnostic procedure with no progress, she changed the ethnicity listed on her health record to Māori. Ten days later, she was booked in.

According to Rose, nothing else changed. Her medical history remained the same. Her symptoms remained the same. Her income and personal circumstances remained the same. Only the ethnicity recorded in her health file was altered.

The most significant example involved a colonoscopy, a procedure that is notoriously difficult to access publicly in Canterbury unless strict eligibility criteria are met.

Rose says she has a strong family history of colon cancer, with her great-grandfather, grandfather, and uncle all dying from the disease. She is 50 years old and had abnormal symptoms. After completing the required test kit, she says the District Health Board approved her for a colonoscopy.

But approval did not translate into treatment.

She says she remained on the waiting list for months without any indication of when the procedure would be carried out. Eventually, she assumed she would need to go private and pay for it herself.

That changed after her health record was updated.

Rose says she later received a call from a private hospital advising that it was working to reduce wait lists for the procedure and that she had been booked in. The colonoscopy was fully funded.

Asked whether the timing could have been a coincidence, Rose says she cannot rule that out. However, she says the speed at which her situation changed was difficult to ignore.

Her account highlights a growing and contentious issue within New Zealand’s healthcare system: the role ethnicity plays in prioritisation and access to services.

Health authorities argue that Māori experience poorer health outcomes on average and that targeted initiatives are necessary to address long-standing inequities. These initiatives include free cervical smears, free flu vaccinations, and outreach programmes aimed at improving access to care.

When ethnicity becomes a determining factor in access to treatment, it risks creating a two-tier system where patients with comparable clinical need are treated differently based on ancestry rather than medical urgency.

Rose’s experience, if accurate, suggests ethnicity can function not just as a public health lens but as a practical gateway to care, including procedures delivered by private providers using public funding.

Most clinicians are likely acting in good faith within the constraints of the system. However, those constraints are policy-driven, and current policies explicitly allow for ethnicity-based prioritisation in some settings.

Many argue healthcare should be triaged on clinical need alone. When access to publicly funded treatment can change dramatically based on how an ethnicity field is completed on a form, it raises legitimate questions about fairness, transparency, and public trust.

Rose says she did not expect the outcome she experienced. But having seen how quickly her access to care changed, she believes the issue warrants public scrutiny.

Name changed to protect privacy.