Te Whare Tapa Whā is a well recognised Māori model of health and wellbeing, created by Sir Mason Durie, and is embraced within the health system in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It was the first indigenous Māori model of health to be recognised and utilised in mainstream services in the early 1980s. This model was created to give Māori a voice, helping non-Māori to understand Māori health, but also create a pathway for other models to be developed and thrive.

Mental health is complex, there can be more than one explanation for deteriorated or multiple factors that have contributed to the outcome. There is high population of Māori tangata whaiora which is disproportionate to the amount of Māori mental health nurses, but organisations encourage nurses to use Māori concepts within nursing cares to bridge the gap and try to improve equity. Reflecting on these thoughts, I wanted to conduct research around them which is how I came up with my research topic.

My research is the first to be conducted of its kind looking at mental health nurses, Māori and non-Māori, perceptions of Te Whare Tapa Whā. This created some barriers for my literature review, so a broader search was utilised. As the researcher, I was interested in seeing what nurses thought about the model, what they knew, if they implemented it and if they found it useful in nursing care. A mixed method approach was conducted but based around Māori centred research.

Important information was gathered from this research, reinforcing the need for more Māori mental health nurses, acknowledging the different depths and knowledge between Māori and non-Māori, emphasising the need for further education for staff and students, and that further research needs to be done for this topic.