During a wide-ranging interview with RNZ’s Nine to Noon, our GM Kate Moodabe made a plea for more funding to address health and social inequities and boost service delivery in community settings.
Kate’s comments come hot on the heels of being crowned winner of both the CareHQ Outstanding Contribution to Health award and the ProPharma Supreme Award at the recent 2025 New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards | He Tohu Mauri Ora.
She told interviewer Kathryn Ryan health funders should give more support to the great local solutions for health screening and long-term condition management in community settings.
Kate described how the PHO had holistically started tackling one of New Zealand toughest health challenges through a community partnership.
“Our PHO is largely in the more deprived areas of Auckland, so the healthy shopping options are limited, and obesity is a large driver of many of the long-term conditions that we are trying to deal with, specifically heart disease and diabetes,” Kate said.
“A lot of the people with weight problems are very loath to go into a general practice, they feel judged, the last thing they need to hear is ‘well you need to go away and lose weight’. We all hate hearing that. Nobody likes stepping on scales.”
This prompted Total Healthcare to form a partnership with BBM Motivation in 2022 (that runs the From the Couch programmes in its gyms) due to the successful community relationships BBM had already built in south and west Auckland.
So much more than a weight loss programme
The partnership means the PHO provides preventive health checks and wellness support in the BBM gyms where people area already going for motivation, exercise and nutrition assistance.
“We’ve always said that From the Couch is not just a weight loss programme, it’s far from that, it’s a connective programme. It helps people feel included, it makes the biggest change in their lives and honestly in their family lives too.”
But Kate says Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora provides only small annual funding towards evaluations of the programme. The PHO is the one contributing to operational costs.
She urged funders to give greater support to initiatives like this in community settings.
“The problem we’ve got is we’ve scared people over the years, even with the idea of heart disease and diabetes. And what we haven’t said is it’s actually pretty easy to manage once we find it. Once we diagnose you it’s not the end of the world, we can manage you very safely and it will help your lifestyle.”
MSD and ACC should also provide funding because of the benefits to mobility and the ability of people to rejoin the workforce, says Kate.
She also called for capitation funding to acknowledge deprivation and ethnicity in “a much bigger and more meaningful way”.
Kate noted the PHO had also self-funded point-of-care finger prick blood tests at From the Couch. People with weight issues find the traditional blood tests very painful and were previously leaving before the final health tests. Retention rates rose from 50 percent to over 75 percent after point-of-care testing was introduced.
