A Strength-Based and Peer Education Approach to helping Maori elders work through greatest needs

This project uses a tuakana-teina (older sibling/younger sibling)/peer education orientation programme for service utilisation for health and wellbeing needs. Through a co-design process we worked with five service providers to identify the key health and social issues particular to their community. Once these were defined, a resource kit and orientation programme was created to guide four kaumatua to be tuakana (peer educators) with each service provider. The tuakana then serve as tuakana for six teina for a period of six months. Teina are the recipients of the peer education. The resource kit include a variety of health and social services to refer the teina. The Tuakana Orientation Programme is a training programme consisting of four, three-hour sessions over a two-week period (i.e., 2 sessions per week) guiding the tuakana on peer education skills from a Maori perspective (e.g., effective listening, eliciting information, sharing stories and providing advice/referrals). After completing the orientation programme, tuakana will talk with teina once a month for six months to understand their needs and empower them to gain access to needed health and social services. Each conversation will last between 30 and 60 minutes and be face-to-face. They will share the resource kit with the teina and link them to advocates withing their respective health providers. The aim is to select teina participants randomly from a list of elders within each provider. They are assigned an intervention time based on location and assigned a tuakana based on matching characteristics (i.e., age and gender).