Margie Apa
Taking on the biggest job in health Elizabeth Brown | Senior Communications Advisor
F
epulea’i Margie Apa was involved in setting up the country’s District Health Boards more than 20 years ago. Now she is heading up the single organisation replacing them.
her family village on the island of Savai’i), Margie has held many senior positions in the health sector over the past 24 years. Most recently she was Chief Executive of Counties Manukau DHB.
Margie has been appointed as the interim Chief Executive of Health New Zealand. She started the job early this year and will lead Health NZ when it officially comes into being on 1 July. Health NZ will merge the functions of the existing DHBs and lead the day-today operational running of the health system. Significantly it will become the country’s largest employer with a workforce of about 80,000.
Motivation
Raised in south Auckland and proudly Samoan (Fepulea’i is a chief title from
8 THE SPECIALIST | MARCH 2022
The opportunity to “really get traction on improving health equity” is what pushed her to want to take on such a large and challenging role. “We know there are pockets of our communities - Ma-ori, Pacific, low income, rural – and we need to support a diversity of models that will reach out to those communities more easily and that’s what really motivated me to apply.”
Simplifying and taking out what she calls “unwanted variation” in patient care, added motivation. “I think one of the advantages of being one organisation is that we can simplify funding arrangements. We can make decisions and move more quickly to implement them and try to get the balance right in developing enough flexibility locally, but also assure New Zealanders that they are getting consistency and quality of care or access, although it may look different for their local area.” With the clock ticking down on July 1, exactly what Health New Zealand will look like and how it will run, is still unclear.
