Why MAPAS still matters after 50 years: 'Bringing everyone to the same starting point'

For more than 50 years, the Māori and Pacific Admission Scheme, commonly known as MAPAS, has strengthened New Zealand's healthcare system by helping bring Māori and Pacific students into an essential service profession where they have historically been underrepresented.

And to remember the remarkable contribution of Emeritus Professor Colin Mantell (Ngāi Tahu), whose work helped shape MAPAS and different aspects of Māori and Pacific healthcare, generations of health leaders gathered at Waipapa Taumata Rau on Wednesday.

For current and former MAPAS students and graduates, Prof Mantell's lifelong commitment to Māori and Pacific health was a stark reminder of why the programme continues to matter.

"The biggest thing is that MAPAS provides the foundation to be able to unify one another," Joshua Jay Matenga, 22, said.

"The idea of MAPAS is to make a collective empowerment to bring us together, but also to be able to celebrate both the diversity and the academia as well, of our achievements.

"It's more of a platform that raises the ability to emphasise the Māori success and the Pacific success that we have ... so if anything, it's more about trying to embrace what we already have and bringing it to a higher light."

Te Paea Ma'u, 20, agreed with Matenga's sentiments, describing MAPAS as a programme focused on equity.

"It's so important that we have a health system that is representative of the populations that we have, and just due to the systemic effects of colonisation and the inequities that have persisted from that, we don't currently have that healthcare system," Ma'u said.

"The whole role of MAPAS is to just ensure that we do have that for the future... it is just giving the opportunity for tauira who do want to get into healthcare that opportunity, that they can if that's what they want."

ACT leader David Seymour has called ethnicity-based admission pathways discriminatory, while the National-ACT coalition agreement led to a government review of targeted medical school admission programmes.

Seymour's criticism has not extended to the Rural Admissions Scheme, which selects students based on their attendance at rural primary and secondary schools.

"I oppose racial discrimination. I don't oppose living in the country. I don't oppose, for example, trying to train rural GPs. I don't oppose bonding people to work in the countryside where it's hard to get people … those are separate issues," he previously told RNZ.

The review has reportedly been completed and is awaiting release.

Samoan doctor Joseph Johnston graduated through MAPAS in 2025, and is now in his first year as a house officer at Waitākere Hospital.

He will move to Middlemore Hospital next year as he works towards his long-term goal of becoming a surgeon.

Since leaving university, Johnston said the importance of having Māori and Pacific health professionals had become even more apparent.

While in medical school, tauira are taught about health inequities and the wider social and economic factors influencing Māori and Pacific health.

But Johnston said that real-life experience in hospitals had clearly shown him what representation could mean in those everyday interactions with patients.

"I think just being a voice and actually representing our people and advocating for our people in spaces that there's not a lot of advocacy for ... is something that's really important," Johnston said.

Disproportionate statistical representation

Māori experience a life expectancy gap of around seven years and greater barriers to accessing healthcare.

The current gap in representation shows that Māori make up less than 6 percent of the medical workforce, despite making up around 18 percent of the population.

Pacific representation among doctors is even lower.

Across a variety of measures, Māori and Pacific peoples continue to experience substantially worse health outcomes. Māori women have more than three times the lung cancer registration of non-Māori women. Māori adults have twice the rate of ischaemic heart disease.

Pacific life expectancy remains about six years behind that of non-Māori, non-Pacific people. They also have the highest rates of diabetes and gout examined in the ethnic groups observed in Tupu Ola Moui.

Professor David Tipene-Leach, who was involved in the programme's early development, said the ultimate goal was a Māori and Pacific health workforce capable of serving its own communities.

"What we need is allies who are there with us in the battle for good health for Māori [and] Pacific people. In fact, for everybody in Aotearoa New Zealand who, at the moment, don't get a fair deal," he said.

"MAPAS graduates pass at the same rates. They stay in New Zealand. They don't go overseas. They are more likely to become general practitioners, and we know there's a shortage of that," Tipene-Leach added.

"They're more likely to go into the regions and to rural medicine, and we know there's a shortage there. So the argument is that, and I've heard [Prof Paparangi Reid] say this time and time again, is that these are exactly the doctors that we should be training in New Zealand."

Johnston shared a similar sentiment - that much of the criticism of MAPAS comes from a misunderstanding of the programme, including a misconception that Māori and Pacific students face lower standards.

"There's the misunderstanding that we get in easier and that we don't have to meet the same requirements," he said.

"Our graduates meet those requirements and go above and beyond those requirements. And actually as we enter the workforce, some of the best doctors that I've been lucky enough to work with this year have been MAPAS graduates."

Current students made a similar distinction, clarifying that MAPAS is not about giving somebody an advantage, but rather addresses an existing disadvantage.

"Removing one aspect will eventually lead to the removal of a bigger kaupapa there, so I'd say it would be very hard for us to be involved in this field or in this profession if this wasn't here in the first place," added Matenga.

"I think that when you stand in a place of privilege, to provide equity feels like you're providing inequality to that person.

"We are just trying to bring everyone up to the same starting point. We're not trying to lift those above anyone else."