Veterinary Voices
Veterinary Voices celebrates all that's great about working in the veterinary industry in New Zealand.
Each week Julie South (of VetStaff - New Zealand's only recruitment agency specialising in helping veterinary professionals find jobs they're excited about going to on Monday mornings) catches up with industry professionals who join her in celebrating life as a veterinary professional in New Zealand.
Get ready to hear how "veterinary" is a great career choice and how New Zealand is a great place to live and work as a veterinary professional.
Together with her guests, Julie South is on a mission to celebrate positive, dynamic and healthy workplaces where everyone loves going to work on Monday mornings.
Veterinary Voices
The Artist in Scientist's Clothing: Companion Animal Veterinarian Dr Jane Jones
Dr. Jane Jones, a pioneering voice in veterinary narratives, invites us into her world as she navigates the complexities of qualitative research in veterinary science.
With a unique focus on the experiences of Māori veterinarians and vet nurses in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Dr Jane's research journey unveils the challenges and rewards of exploring a field with sparse literature.
Her collaboration with Associate Professor Dr Francesca Brown and her dedication to learning Te Reo Māori highlight not only her personal growth but also her commitment to enhancing cultural sensitivity within veterinary practices.
Through this episode (part one of two), you're offered a thoughtful reflection on the intersection of Māori culture and veterinary science, as Dr Jane shares the profound impact of indigenous perspectives on animal care.
We further explore how integrating te reo Māori into veterinary consultations has sparked varied reactions and why understanding Māori views on animals can transform welfare practices.
Dr Jane provides insights from key studies and interviews, unveiling themes of cultural visibility and safety within the profession.
As host, Julie South, and Dr Jane delve into broader historical trends - including language loss and educational struggles among Māori communities - this episode challenges us to reconsider the role of indigenous perspectives in building trust and improving outcomes in veterinary care.
Join Julie South and Dr Jane Jones for a thought-provoking chat that not only enlightens, but also inspires, a rethinking of our approach to cultural dynamics in the veterinary world.
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How would you describe yourself? Companion animal veterinarian Dr Jane Jones describes herself as an artist in scientist's clothing, and it's this passion for wanting to explore beyond the absolute numbers and putting things into boxes that I'm sure you'll pick up on today as we talk, as Dr Jane and I talk about her qualitative research entitled Experiences of Maori Veterinarians and Veterinary Nurses in the Veterinary Profession in Ōtiroa a narrative inquiry. She's doing that with Dr Francesca Brown of Ōtaigo Polytech. Welcome to Veterinary Voices. This is episode 213, and I'm your host, Julie South. With listeners tuning in from over 1, 1400 cities worldwide, Veterinary Voices celebrates all that's great about working in New Zealand's veterinary industry. I'd love to hear where you're listening from right now, so please feel free to share your location with me at veterinaryvoicesnz. It's also at veterinarianvoicesnz where you can find back copies as well. Veterinary Voices is brought to you by VetStaff, New Zealand's only recruitment agency specialising in helping veterinary professionals find jobs. They're excited about going to on Monday mornings in Kiwi vet clinics, Vetstaffconz.
Speaker 1:Dr Jane Jones is a companion animal veterinarian based in Otahi, Christchurch, Otiroa, New Zealand. Dr Jane started out as a mixed practice veterinarian in Southland and, despite being born in the North Island, has spent most of her working life in the South Island In small animal practice. Dr Jane has an interest in dermatology, Learning Te Reo over the last three years for overseas listeners Te Reo is conversational Maori has been a big journey for Jane. She's just completed level five of eight levels and has contributed to a growing curiosity and interest in Te Ao Māori. What is Te Ao Māori? Well, Te Ao Māori is the Māori worldview. This includes the culture, the language and the social and political structures of the Maori people of Aotearoa, New Zealand. It's a holistic perspective that's strong on the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things and the importance of relationships between people and nature.
Speaker 1:Associated with Dr Jane's journey has been a move into the research space, which is what we are chatting about today. She's currently writing up a paper of qualitative research entitled, as I said earlier, Experiences of Maori Veterinarians and Veterinary Nurses in the Veterinary Profinary profession in Aotearoa a narrative inquiry and she's doing that with Associate Professor Dr Francesca Brown of Otago Polytech. In her spare time, Dr Jane tells me she loves a robust, meandering reflection, throwing poems out to the world, moving, which includes biking, running, skiing, dancing and tramping, facilitating creative writing in prison, smelling harakiki flowers, drinking coffee, singing harmonies and reading beautifully written books. She wonders whether she probably asks too many hard questions, but that depends. We kick off this first part of Dr Jane's and my chat where I ask her where she started with her research. Where did you start with this research?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's it. It feels about three years ago I knew Francesca from vet school and she has been teaching vet nursing for many years at Otago Poly and the school of Otago Polytech had been awarded a Staff Excellence Award for the implementation of a Māori strategic framework and that came with a grant. And I had, after a random conversation with Francesca, been working with her on another paper. It was about client experiences with the veterinary profession or veterinary sector, and we're about to have that paper published, so it's called Client Experiences with Veterinary Professionals and that was a narrative inquiry study where we interviewed clients about their experiences and I'd really enjoyed doing that research. I found that I really enjoyed talking to people and Francesca said to me well, would you like to be, would you like to be involved in this next bit of research on and it had a big long title Matauranga, māori and the Veterinary Sector, and I thought no. My first thought was I'm not the right person for that. I'm not Māori, I'm not the right person. But at the same time I was just starting to learn te reo and I was just starting on this very early journey, sort of taking some steps away from my normal sort of veterinary practice and starting to become more interested and over time, as I started to learn more about the language, I started to think well, actually I would be really interested to do this, I'd be really interested in starting to think about this space.
Speaker 2:So we started with this body of research that I was responsible for, which was basically like a literature search on what was out there already in terms of Māori and the veterinary sector and where those things intersected. What I didn't know was that I'd been handed something of which there was barely any research and there was this huge, open sort of hole that had not much in it that I could find. So I really was starting. I remember creating an image for a slideshow of me standing at the bottom of a mountain, staring up at it and just going where do I start? And so there was a couple of papers which we'll mention in the paper that we're writing.
Speaker 2:That kind of started me down the track, and one was a paper by Eloise Gillings, which she'd done a PhD. She's a lecturer at Massey and is Maori, and she'd looked at the sort of access to veterinary education for Maori and some of the issues around that. So that was quantitative study. So she was looking at the numbers of Maori coming into the student cohort and then starting to look at their background like the decile of the school, they went to their family of origin in terms of had anyone else gone to university from their family and starting to look at the layers in which, you know, things were different for the Māori students often compared to the maybe the New Zealand European students.
Speaker 2:So I read that paper and then I also started to delve into the human world Maori and human health and there's a world of literature out there that has been written for decades and in education, but unfortunately in the veterinary sector we just have almost none. So it was yeah, I guess I'll stop the answer there in terms of it's been a huge journey to try and untangle and to think about what are the things we want to be exploring here, or what you know, where are the gaps, where are the crossovers, where are the connections? And that eventually led on to the project which we're doing now.
Speaker 1:You're a veterinarian yourself, or you trained as a veterinarian and you mentioned, so you're a scientist, right? You mentioned qualitative and quantitative just now. Research. Was it hard for you to change your thinking from quantitative to qualitative?
Speaker 2:The answer to that question is probably no, because while I am a scientist, I feel like I probably am more. The arts probably has my heart, maybe more. So I've been an artist in science clothing maybe for a long time. I'm still a vet and I love the science, I think, but I just love talking to people and I think qualitative is. You know, I know that a lot of scientists find it wishy-washy, but when you get people talking about you know their actual stories and their actual thoughts or experiences or feelings like it's incredibly rich and powerful data, data and actually some of the quantitative data you know. I suppose for me and my personality sometimes there's an element of I just I've become, it's become less interesting to me as I've got older. I think it really really, really interested my brain when I was, you know, maybe younger and maybe this is a stage of life thing. It's like you start to stand back from it all and go well, what does it all mean? And the numbers mean less to me now and the stories mean a lot more.
Speaker 1:Why do you think that? I guess you've sort of answered it, but just in case there's a little bit more there why do you think that qualitative research was the way to go for you with this topic?
Speaker 2:to go for you with this topic. I think what we needed to hear. And what we need to hear is sort of much richer information than numbers. And when you ask questions you know if you ask a specific question to get a specific quantitative kind of answer that you can put in a box, you're just going to get one layer of information. But when you ask an open-ended question, you get all these nuances and these kind of themes and stories which feed into whole sort of ideas and images which would be very difficult to get with quantitative research, because I think a lot of the time with quantitative research people end up asking questions which are not the best questions to ask when they're trying to dig out numbers. You know, while that and they work together and you know you can't, you can't have one without the other. Like Eloise Gillings PhD thesis is so useful, you know to have to have some, some background data, but then I find the introduction and the discussion far more interesting than the actual numbers for me. But you need those numbers to talk to.
Speaker 1:In your discussions. What did you learn, discover and or? My question here is what surprises did you come across, if any?
Speaker 2:I think it's all. It's all new information to me, like in many ways or not. Yeah, not not all of it. I think it's really interesting to hear what it feels like to be Maori in the, in the sector, to be in that, in that body and in that life experience. And I guess you find things that you've been blind to because I'm New Zealand European, I've grown up in a New Zealand European world, and you just start to have your eyes open to things that you've never seen before or never heard before, and we can only find that out by asking these people. So that's surprising I wouldn't necessarily use the word surprise Fascinating maybe, sometimes very moving, sometimes upsetting, sometimes really enlightening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know whether you'll be able to answer this because of privacy, privacy conditions. Are you able to give examples of what you're talking about here? You just said that you kind of didn't know what it was or had. No, what word did you use? Surprise? Was my word Enlightening? That what it's like being Maori when you're a European?
Speaker 2:I think you can be aware of judgments and assumptions people are making around you that they might not even be aware that they're making, but you are more acutely attuned to them because they're hitting you personally. So, whether it's an assumption or a judgment about a client who's coming in, or whether it's about Māori in general, or whether it's an opinion about some aspect of society, those things, when they're voiced by either your colleagues or your clients or whatever, they're felt more keenly because they're affecting you directly. And a lot of that goes unseen. It just is, it's underneath the surface.
Speaker 1:Are we talking? I don't want to put words in your mouth. Are we talking unconscious cognitive biases or prejudices here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely In so many different ways. Like you know, we talked about, for instance, just something as simple as using te reo in consults or in the context of a clinic or whatever. Like it's not used in barely in New Zealand, it's never heard. I've never worked in a clinic where I've heard it being used and it's not so it's not at all normalized, so it's not at all normalized. And then people talk about you know how sort of both sides of it. Like they talk about the joy that they see on the faces of the people that they use it with when it means something to them, and they also talk about that kind of that little subtle body language or vibe that's given off when it's used for someone who doesn't want to hear it, you know, and both of those things are felt and seen, I suppose.
Speaker 1:I've got two questions. Are you fluent in Te Reo now or were you when you started?
Speaker 2:I am not fluent in Te Reo. That's another whole story. I'm level just finished level five, embarrassingly. I'd like to be a lot more fluent than I am and I never will be. That's a lifelong journey. When I started I was level one, so that as a side part of my research has been an enormous journey and a huge bit of work personally to have been on and a huge bit of work personally to have been on.
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Speaker 2:It's funny because when I started doing this research, way back in the literature review stage of things, and I started to think about what this meant for me, I've done a lot of standing back and thinking about this and one of the things that one of the quotes that came from the research with the client experiences so not Māori research was you know, somebody said every person is attached to their animal. I suppose this is within a small animal, as in, every animal has a person attached to it, and you could say that about all the animals in New Zealand. Like the native animals don't have people attached, but they have people who have been assigned to be guardians of the native animals. All the farm animals have people who either own them and control them, and all of the small animals do as well. So what those people believe, or who they are, or their values that they hold, all of those are so acutely tied up with how those animals will eventually be cared for or treated or looked after, right? So, yeah, it blew me away a little bit when I first started standing back from this and thinking that when I read through the code of conduct, for instance, for veterinarians, and there's just this huge amount of emphasis on welfare of the individual animal. And you know, we, we focus on all these, even our laws, like the animal welfare act or whatever the the legal side of things is all around the protection of animals and yet there there just doesn't. There seems to be this gap between this connection, between the fact that you have to bring those, those people have to be on board, you have to to build trust and care for the people in order to care for their animals, because they're not going to sign up for whatever you're suggesting unless you have that relationship with them. So to me it's a little bit of a segue, I suppose.
Speaker 2:But Maori, their view of animals, for some of them will be quite different from ours and I and ours, ours and ours and theirs is a dumb way of putting it, because everybody has a different version of you know what they believe.
Speaker 2:But you know it's important to go back to some of the understandings of Māori and animals.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think there's another paper that I read early on which was a master's thesis, which was looking at animal welfare and Māori and trying to explore some of those themes, and that had a great deal of unpacking for some of the things that I then went on to read a lot more about, but that was about models of welfare that we hold in New Zealand, you know, in European kind of thinking, and then trying to interview Māori and understand that better.
Speaker 2:And I guess the bottom line out of that paper was that, you know, some of the thinking that we've built our legislation around and our thinking around is very much European influenced. It's not indigenous thinking and there are other ways of thinking about welfare that we just don't happen to hold the only way of thinking about this and as humans we seem to have to learn this over and over again. But it's really strongly held on to this kind of belief that we hold all the right and sacred and, you know, correct ways of seeing the world and thinking about the world. But Māori have quite different ways of seeing and understanding animals and the world and it's really important for our veterinary sector to really dig into that and to understand that and it will enrich the way we think about it as well.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. One of the you were talking just now and one of the things that came to mind related to research that Francesca did about what clients want, and I'm not sure whether the research that you've mentioned just now is further research than what she and I were talking about when she appeared on the show a couple of years back, but she said that this is me paraphrasing on my memory of what I thought I heard her say was that one of the things that clients want when and this is companion animals when they come into the clinic is that the nurse, the receptionist, the vet knows that animal, that it's all about the animal's name, the animal as an individual, rather than the person holding the cage or the reins that happens to have the checkbook as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would say one of the things I've a comment I'd make about that in regards to Māori is that that's maybe you know, for some individual people that's going to be exactly the same. They really would love you to know their animal well. But also there's the wider considerations of the whānau, the context of where the animal comes from. If that animal is an extended member of their whānau, then it's not just about the very sort of individualistic way of looking at things that we have. So I sort of feel like they're better at looking at the whole situation, the whole wider view of health, rather than the individual pussycat that has a specific problem. You know, like maybe that's being a bit idealistic, but that's my impression.
Speaker 1:Jane, what other or any research has been done in relation to Māori and veterinary science in New Zealand?
Speaker 2:Well, unfortunately almost none, as far as I can work out Like, if you do, I'm going to refer to these papers in my research. But there was kind of three papers that kind of show up. One is the PhD I've talked about by Eloise Gillings, another is a master's thesis about welfare and animals and Māori and that was by Jordan Woodhouse. And the third paper is just like a tiny little paper where they explore one of the polytechs in Auckland explored introducing Māori tikanga in relation to animal euthanasia, and that's just literally a tiny little paper. But that as far as I can tell, unless you start heading into all the human health side of things and I'm hopefully not going to offend anyone by saying this, but as far as I can tell, that's about it.
Speaker 1:Do you know whether there has been research in other countries, veterinary science and their indigenous people I'm thinking Australia Aborigines, I'm thinking North America and the Native American Indians.
Speaker 2:That's a good question. The only thing I'm just off the top of my head, the only thing which I referred to in the first bit of research I did, so it probably won't be referred to in this paper was the Sydney School of Veterinary Medicine, I think, introduced as part of their program looking into Aboriginal ways of seeing, and they had I can't again remember off the top of their programme looking into Aboriginal ways of seeing, and they had I can't again remember off the top of my head but this was a few years ago. They introduced it and they had the veterinary students going out to like sort of I don't know smoking ceremonies and dancing and they met with these Aboriginal elders and they heard stories about animals and so it's a start. But I don't know about research as such, but I know that they made a point of incorporating that into their programme, which seems like a bit of a first from what I can tell from around the world.
Speaker 1:Jane, how did you do the research?
Speaker 2:So we used a technique called a snowballing technique, whereby we had a couple of contacts in the sector and we put the word out on Facebook and one person led to another, all through word of mouth, so it was mainly through word of mouth. We tracked people down. We've interviewed 13 Maori vet nurses and vets in total. Some of them are still working in the sector and some of them have left. I conducted interviews with them and we had sort of four questions. We asked them about their journey into the profession, so their educational journey, and we're going to hopefully write another paper detailing the education side of things.
Speaker 2:We asked about Te Tiriti and the veterinary world and what their experience was, what their thinking was about that. We asked about in terms of the culture of veterinary practice. Did they feel culturally safe and what stories or observations did they have to inform those thoughts and about any opportunities they could see in the sector in regards to that. And then we asked about their observations or stories regarding Maori clients, like what had they observed about the experiences of Maori clients in the sector. And so each interview lasted about an hour.
Speaker 2:The longest one I did was the first one, which was an epic interview, fascinating, but it was two hours. I felt like I'd been given a taonga at the end and all of them were. It was so cool to do. I've obviously listened to them many times because we had to transcribe them and each interview has all these incredible little nuggets in it as well. And then from there we've transcribed the interviews, then we've kind of read through and kind of worked out the themes, the major themes which have taken some kind of condensing, and now we're in the process of writing up the paper.
Speaker 1:What was without? If you can answer without giving away breaking privacy, what was the age range? The reason I'm asking that question is because did you notice differences, generational differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, so we had. I think we the vet nurses are often usually younger, I guess. So, yeah, we had probably early 20s to as maybe as old, as you know, late 60s. It's a big age range. I think the differences are almost more about New Zealand history, like, if I stand back and think about it, I think you know you've got a. What has happened for Māori over the last kind of, say, 60 years is really reflected in the stories of those participants. For instance, many of the older participants had lost their language because their parents had been punished for speaking it, so it was lost from their whānau altogether, and the education experiences were completely different as well. They were pushed away from professions and into trades, which is just the story of New Zealand. It's not especially a veterinary story. It's the story of New Zealand. It's not especially a veterinary story. It's the story of our history.
Speaker 1:What big themes came out of the research.
Speaker 2:I think, the big things we're going to talk about in the paper. The first theme is the visibility of Māori. So for a start, there are hardly any Māori in the profession, which isn't necessarily a theme because that's something we already know. But even the people that are there, as you and I know, māori people come in all shapes and forms. They don't look Māori necessarily. So people can strongly identify as Māori and they are Māori, maori, but they might look to someone else, as though they're just New Zealand European. So for a lot of people being unseen as Maori is quite tricky. So they're not acknowledged or they don't feel like they can show up as Maori in the profession. They feel like they're showing up with the assumption that they kind of have a New Zealand European Pākehā view of the world and not understood as having an entire sort of world or background in behind them which is quite different to the world that they're working in. And that also was a little tricky for some of them when they would have this racist or unconscious bias or assumptions or stereotypes made about Māori around them, apparently without understanding or acknowledgement that they were Māori. So they're seeing that and feeling that, even though to the people who are doing it. They're not realising that it's impacting them.
Speaker 2:I suppose another theme was we talked about the absence of te ao Māori in the profession. So we don't have, we have very, very little use of te reo, like even tokenism, like we don't have it spoken, we don't have it barely in signage. It's not like your classic. I'm not saying the medical profession are doing it any better, necessarily, but like it's quite normal now to go into a space and find a lot of things written in te reo as well as English. We're not hearing it, we're not using it, it's not normalized as a way of greeting someone or Maori words being used in a consultation.
Speaker 2:And then tikanga was another big thing around. So tikanga, I think, is a good way of thinking about it, for Pākehā is like the safe or appropriate thing at the right time and setting. So if we're going to think of tikanga from a New Zealand, european way of thinking about it, it might be well. When you go to have dinner at someone's house, you use a knife and fork and you thank the cook at the end of the meal. When you go into someone's house, if you've got dirty shoes, you take them off.
Speaker 2:You know there's all these things that we just do in everyday life, which are tikanga, which we have little ways in which we organise our society and the way we do things that keep us kind of feeling safe and comfortable. Well, for Māori, tikanga is something that is built into their ancient ways of being, but it's also being new and developed in different settings, and in the Māori sorry, in the veterinary world we have almost I would say almost like a complete absence of any acknowledgement of Māori tikanga in regards to things that we do or services we provide.
Speaker 1:I hope you found what Dr Jane and I have been talking about interesting. Remember to tune in next week where Dr Jane goes into the different steps that clinics can take to help ensure that tikanga doing the right thing in the right way at the right time can happen in your clinic. This is Julie South signing off and inviting you to go out there and be your most fantabulous self Until next week. Thank you for listening. Ka kite anō.
