Rangahau
What the research shows
57 papers published by members of Hei Āhuru Mōwai, read and grouped into themes. This page sets out what each summary was built from, and what the collection does not reach.
How to read this page
Who wrote the summaries
Every summary here was written for this website by Redux, the team building it, from the paper itself. They are not the authors’ abstracts and they are not the authors’ words. Each paper is linked, so any summary can be checked against it.
Hei Āhuru Mōwai has not yet reviewed this page or the summaries on it.
What was actually read
37 of these summaries were written from the whole paper. 3 were written from part of one, where only some sections could be reached. 17 – 30% of the collection – were written from the abstract alone.
Where the assessment records a reason it differs from paper to paper: a paywall or a sign-in wall, a publisher page that refused an automated request, a file that could not be fetched. Some record no reason at all. Each paper below carries a badge saying how much of it was read, and the route taken to it is printed with the summary in the assessment’s own words.
A summary built from an abstract, or from part of a paper, deserves less weight than one built from the whole of it. Nothing on this page pretends otherwise.
Not all of it has results
4 of these are registered protocols: the design of a study, published before it has findings. A further 13 are viewpoints, commentaries, editorials, position letters or narrative reviews, which argue a case or draw together other people’s work rather than report a new dataset. Both kinds are worth reading and neither is evidence of an outcome.
The method line on each entry says which kind of document it is.
How the collection was gathered
These are papers Hei Āhuru Mōwai holds, gathered because its members wrote them. No systematic search was run, and no inclusion criteria were applied beyond that.
A subject missing from this page says nothing about the literature. It says this collection does not hold a paper on it.
6 of these papers are not cancer studies
This is the organisation’s own list of what its members have published, so what is on it is settled by who wrote a paper rather than by what the paper is about. These 6 are named here rather than dropped, each with the assessment’s own words on where it sits.
4 are about the system cancer care runs through
Each is about the system cancer care runs through rather than about a cancer. The assessment records each as not cancer-specific rather than as unrelated, and says what it bears on. 3 of them also sit under a theme below.
- What we do matters: Supporting anti-racism and decolonisation of public health teaching and practice through the development of Māori public health competenciesFrom the assessment: It is a workforce-training resource rather than a cancer-outcomes study, of most use to Hei Āhuru Mōwai if it is assessing or building training for people working with Māori across the cancer system, not only clinicians.
- Mortality outcomes and inequities experienced by rural Māori in Aotearoa New ZealandFrom the assessment: This paper is not cancer-specific - it covers all-cause and amenable mortality generally (amenable mortality means deaths that good healthcare could plausibly have prevented, a category that includes but is not limited to some cancers).
- Disparities in post-operative mortality between Māori and non-Indigenous ethnic groups in New ZealandFrom the assessment: This covers surgery generally, not cancer surgery specifically.
- Postoperative mortality in New Zealand following general anaesthetic: demographic patterns and temporal trendsFrom the assessment: This is not a cancer-specific paper, but cancer surgery happens under general anaesthetic, so a gap of this size in the wider surgical system is relevant background for anyone looking at Māori cancer treatment outcomes.
2 the assessment says are not about cancer
Each of these is here because a member of the organisation wrote it. What the assessment says about each, it says in the words below, on that paper’s own terms.
- Tū Kaha: He mōhio ki ngā Māori o te kōmaoa waewae (Stand Strong: A qualitative study of Māori with venous leg ulcers in Aotearoa New Zealand)From the assessment: This paper is not about cancer – it concerns venous leg ulcers, a vascular skin condition.
- Te Pepe Ao Uri Whāriki. The development of pūrākau analysis frameworkFrom the assessment: This paper is not about cancer.
The shape of the collection
| Subject | Papers |
|---|---|
| National figures on incidence, stage and survival | 7 |
| Lung cancer | 8 |
| Screening participation and design | 9 |
| Access to surgery and treatment | 10 |
| Time to diagnosis, and the route people take to it | 5 |
| Palliative and end-of-life care | 3 |
| Cancer policy and system design | 9 |
| Data, research governance and workforce | 8 |
| Prevention and co-occurring conditions | 5 |
| Services through COVID-19 | 3 |
| Subject | Papers |
|---|---|
| System and policy | 27 |
| Treatment | 21 |
| Screening | 16 |
| Diagnosis | 13 |
| Data | 12 |
| Prevention | 6 |
| Workforce | 4 |
| Palliative care | 3 |
| Living after treatment | 1 |
The dated papers run from 2016 to 2024. 9 carry no publication year in the assessment, so no date is shown for them rather than a guessed one.
The themes
10 groupings, made for this website so the collection can be read. They are a finding aid, and are not Hei Āhuru Mōwai’s statement of its research priorities.
3 papers in this theme
Show every themeServices through COVID-19
What happened to diagnosis and treatment volumes through 2020, and the shift to phone and video appointments that came with it.
3 papers.
Maintaining cancer services during the COVID-19 pandemic: the Aotearoa New Zealand experience (opens in a new tab)
Summarised from the whole paper· 2021
descriptive national service-data report, 2020 compared with prior years
Our summary of what it found
This paper describes how Te Aho o Te Kahu coordinated cancer services through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. New cancer registrations fell by around 40% during the March-April 2020 lockdown but recovered to 2019 levels by September 2020. Surgery, medical oncology, radiation oncology and haematology services continued through lockdown, largely at pre-pandemic volumes, and telehealth use for oncology follow-up appointments rose sharply during the lockdown month. The paper reports that overall service disruption for Māori was not worse than for non-Māori, with one exception it flags for further attention: lung cancer registrations for Māori fell by around 7.5% relative to 2019.
Why it matters: It suggests that a coordinated national response with an explicit equity focus can hold cancer treatment access steady for Māori through a major health system shock, while still leaving gaps - here in lung cancer diagnosis - that need separate attention.
Limits: This covers New Zealand's first pandemic year only; the paper does not claim these patterns held through later waves or once the country moved away from an elimination strategy.
Read as: Full text via PMC (thelancet.com itself returned a 403 error)
Written for this website from the paper, not the authors’ abstract.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer diagnosis and service access in New Zealand–a country pursuing COVID-19 elimination (opens in a new tab)
Summarised from the whole paper· 2021
descriptive national service-data report, 2020 compared with 2018-2019, stratified by ethnicity
Our summary of what it found
Using national data on cancer registrations, diagnostic testing (including endoscopy) and treatment volumes, the authors compare 2020 against 2018-2019, split by ethnicity. Registrations dropped by around 40% during the March-April 2020 lockdown, then recovered to pre-lockdown levels by around August-September 2020. Surgery and medical oncology saw comparatively little disruption; radiation therapy volumes were down about 8% year-on-year, which the authors attribute partly to a shift toward shorter treatment courses rather than fewer patients treated. Outcome patterns were broadly similar across ethnic groups, though lung cancer diagnosis for Māori is again flagged as an area of concern.
Why it matters: It offers early evidence that a country pursuing COVID-19 elimination was able to protect its cancer diagnostic and treatment pathway through the pandemic's first year, in contrast to countries that saw sustained falls in cancer diagnosis during 2020.
Limits: This covers 2020 only and does not speak to later, more sustained periods of community transmission after New Zealand moved away from elimination.
Read as: Full text via PMC (thelancet.com itself returned a 403 error)
Written for this website from the paper, not the authors’ abstract.
Telehealth as a tool for equity, pros, cons and recommendations (opens in a new tab)
Summarised from the whole paper· 2021
viewpoint / commentary, no new data collected
Our summary of what it found
Written as the COVID-19 lockdown pushed much routine healthcare onto phone and video, this viewpoint sets out the case for and against telehealth as a tool for equity for Māori and Pacific people. It argues telehealth can reduce transport, time and cost barriers to care and widen the pool of clinical expertise available to remote or small communities. It also names the offsetting risk directly: care delivered this way depends on people having a phone, data and digital literacy, so without deliberate attention to equity, telehealth can widen rather than narrow access gaps, and not all care can safely move to phone or video. It recommends collecting connectivity data alongside standard health data, resourcing telehealth roles embedded in Māori and Pacific communities, funding more research led by Māori and Pacific researchers into telehealth experience, and building a telehealth strategy with Te Tiriti o Waitangi and equity as guiding principles.
Why it matters: It sets out the equity trade-offs of telehealth at a point when many services, cancer follow-up appointments among them, moved quickly to phone and video, and argues telehealth needs an equity-first strategy or it risks widening rather than narrowing the access gap for Māori and Pacific people.
Limits: This is a viewpoint from health researchers, not a study reporting new data of its own; it draws on modelled and survey evidence cited in its references. The authors declare no competing interests.
Read as: Full text, read directly from the NZMJ PDF (all pages, including author declarations and references)
Written for this website from the paper, not the authors’ abstract.
What this collection does not cover
Each of these is a statement about the papers on this page, and about nothing else. Research may well exist on all of them. It is not held here.
No evaluation of a cancer navigator or Māori cancer support service
Nothing in this collection tests whether a navigator service or a Māori cancer support service works, for whom, or at what cost.
Several papers here argue that support of that kind is needed. The scoping review of palliative care for Māori reports that whānau-led care works better where it is free of the assumptions built into mainstream services. The Hā Ora work on lung cancer names thin health-literacy support and services that do not accommodate whānau involvement among the barriers people described. The integrative review of health service responses to Indigenous people with cancer found better access where services built culturally appropriate care around the population they served, and flags how few such studies have been published at all.
What none of them does is evaluate a service. That is the largest hole in this collection, and it sits directly under the navigator network this site already points people to.
Cancers with no paper here
This collection does not cover:
- Melanoma and skin cancer
- Head and neck cancer
- Bladder and testicular cancer
A further 3 cancers appear in a single paper each.
Life after treatment
One paper in this collection is tagged as being about living after treatment. This collection does not cover late effects, or returning to work after treatment.
Whose voice is in it
The qualitative work here reports what researchers found across groups of participants. This page summarises those papers at the level of their own findings, and carries no individual account.
Elsewhere on this site
Published rangahau is the full bibliography of members’ work, filterable by subject, year and researcher. It lists more than the papers assessed here.
Rauemi holds the organisation’s own reports and papers, alongside resources published by other organisations and linked to them.
If you are looking for a particular piece of rangahau, email communications@heiahurumowai.org.nz.