Reti, steady, go

If this year's election puts Shane Reti in charge of the health system, his famous DIY approach will be no match for a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

In the early 2000s, Dr Shane Reti spent three years walking across Northland. He was 40, and he’d been a practising GP for about a decade. He’d just been appointed to the local district health board, which was dragging its feet on its health-needs assessment: a statistical sampling of the population to figure out what the region’s most pressing problems were.

So, Reti designed his own study. He took it to the ethics committee at the University of Auckland, who raised eyebrows at his proposed method: he would personally conduct the sample on foot over a number of years during his evenings and weekends. Eventually, they told him to fill his boots; approval was granted.

“I’d call Stats NZ for a meshblock,” Reti recalls, referring to the small geographic areas preferred by government agencies for their analytics, “which could be anywhere in all of Northland. I’d drive there and do 10 houses to the left in that meshblock. Streets and roads I never knew.”

He knocked on doors and asked residents to answer his survey questions. And because he wanted his study to be true to its design, he went to properties that were inaccessible and sometimes downright dangerous. He got lost; bitten by a dog. “I nearly drove into a flooded stream trying to get to the house across it. Didn’t see it in the dark. Wasn’t until I heard a noise and it was boulders rolling down the flooded water. I thought, what the heck’s that? I stopped the car in time.”