Health professional news

Meet Sharon Pihema

Sharon Pihema (Ngāti Porou) was appointed in May as the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation’s first Māori Community Liaison.

We spoke to her to find out a bit more about her role and her own story with respiratory health.

Sharon Pihema pictured with ARFNZ Cheif Executive Letitia Harding

What’s your background Sharon?

My background is in population health and community engagement. I studied physical education and human nutrition at Otago University and over the years have worked in population health and planning and funding for Hauora Tairāwhiti, The Heart Foundation, the Atawhai Charitable Trust and more recently for the Health Quality and Safety Commission.

How did your interest in respiratory health begin?

I got started in respiratory health from our own whānau experience and our daughter‘s journey with brittle asthma and bronchiectasis. We wanted to use her experience to help raise awareness of what it‘s like living with asthma for Māori families.

What attracted you to this role?

We‘ve always supported the Foundation and tried to raise awareness through our personal networks around World Asthma Day or World Smokefree Day. We would put a little post out on Facebook saying support this kaupapa. So, this role is a great opportunity to reach out widely to more whānau and communities.

How did you first find out about the Foundation?

My whānau hasbeen involved with the Foundation since 2014 when our daughter, who was 11 at the time, won one of the respiratory awards. A few months after that she had a real massive asthma attack and ended up with a hypoxic brain injury from it. And I guess that‘s when we started sharing her story. We wanted to share it (her story) because not a lot of people knew how bad an asthma attack could get. She was really lucky to survive that.

What are you going to be doing in this role?

It‘s exciting. I‘m really keen to get out there and start connecting with different hauora and iwi organisations to find out what it‘s like for them supporting their families living with respiratory illnesses. I want to find out what resources they‘re using and some of the challenges that they‘re facing, and then look at what we can do from our side to support their work.

As a parent of a child who has had a serious respiratory illness, what is your advice to other parents in that situation?

For us as a family, we could help our daughter better once we fully understood everything about asthma like what was actually happening inside her lungs, how the medication worked, what was happening in the different kinds of tests that she was going through. Once we understood, we could have really good discussions with everyone that was looking after her. We could start to advocate for our daughter and our family about what was going to work best for us. We asked lots of questions.

Any other advice?

I think it‘s important to recognize that when you have a child with a serious illness, the wider family needs support as well. It’s not the medical stuff, it’s dealing with schoolwork and keeping up with social things. Our children often missed out things like birthday parties because we were in hospital so much. I had to finish full time work because my husband and I couldn’t both work full time and look after our daughter. That then meant less income coming into the house. It can be really hard – you definitely need support.

Sharon Pihema, her whānau and the ARFNZ team.