What Does a Surgeon Look Like?

Why do so few indigenous doctors end up becoming surgeons? And why does it matter?

For this episode, we travelled to the Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education - LIME - Conference in Ōtautahi, to meet trailblazing surgeons, doctors and medical educators from indigenous populations in Canada, USA, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and Aotearoa.

Before that, we spent an evening with Dr Maxine Ronald (Ngāti Wai, Ngāpuhi) who works as a general and oncoplastic surgeon in Whāngerei.

By Emma Espiner and Noelle McCarthy

There's an old joke - what's the difference between god and a surgeon?

God doesn't think he's a surgeon...

That long-standing association of surgery with type A personalities - highly driven, confident (did someone say arrogant?) - exists because the profession draws in people who are comfortable operating in life or death situations - the sorts of situations that also underline their own status, and the power of surgery. So why do so few indigenous doctors end up becoming surgeons? And why does it matter?

In this episode of Getting Better, we meet some doctors who are breaking down that white, male Type- A cliche of a surgeon. But although things are changing, they're changing very slowly. If the number of Māori doctors is proportionally small, the number of Māori surgeons is tiny.

There are 14 consultant surgeons who identify as Māori. This is out of an overall pool of hundreds - if this figure was proportionally balanced in terms of population, it would be closer to 130. If you're Māori looking to get into surgery, you're not only contending with the intense competition to do surgical training, you're also reckoning with expectations about the best thing you can do with your medical degree, as Maxine Ronald ( Ngāpuhi, Ngātiwai) explains over dinner in Whāngerei: "historically, Māori health has been positioned in primary health care, and public health... with good reason, and in specialities it wasn't well understood where you could make an impact."

But even so, Maxine always knew surgery was where she wanted to be: "If you're a Māori doctor, you're expected to contribute, to improve Māori health. And I I wanted to do that, but I just love surgery. And I couldn't not love it and I couldn't do anything else... It still blows me away, this neat feeling - just that immense privilege of, seeing it, of being in theatre, of operating on a real person, with real family and being able to remove disease or pathology... That really seemed like real medicine to me."

Maxine is now a general and oncoplastic breast surgeon, working in Whangārei hospital…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details