Governor General Dame Cindy Kiro (right) and Professor Bev Lawton at the Te Tātai Hauora o Hine / National Centre for Women's Health Research Aotearoa in 2023. Photo: RNZ / Ashleigh McCaull
Excellence was celebrated this week with the announcement of the new Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year.
Professor Bev Lawton (Ngati Porou) is a pioneer in women's health. Her advocacy in the last year in particular has led to an historic shift to HPV self-testing as the primary way to screen for cervical cancer.
She is also the founder and director of Te Tātai Hauora o Hine / National Centre for Women's Health Research Aotearoa.
Speaking to RNZ's Saturday Morning from Portugal, where she was attending a conference on the human papillomavirus, Lawton said her win was "an affirmation for the importance of women's health" and "all the wahine and all the clinicians and everyone that had been part of all the work we do and our iwi and community".
Lawton said any of the other women up for the title - such as champion kayaker Dame Lisa Carrington and renowned Black Fern Sarah Hirini - would have been deserving winners too.
She said in the first year of self-testing there were more than 560,000 screens, with 81 percent of women choosing to do it themselves.
"All the community's embracing it and being empowered, so the whole system and what the ministry has done and Te Whatu Ora has been great. And so that image is really positive.
"It's like flipping the narrative from something uncomfortable - why shouldn't you have a speculum when you don't need one?
Professor Bev Lawton Photo: © Victoria University of Wellington. All rights reserved.
"So anyone who's out there who needs to have a screen to prevent cervical cancer should see your doctor or your nurse, and you can do it yourself. It's very simple, it's very effective, and it's a better test that we had previously and it's more effective."
If she had a magic wand and unlimited funding, Lawton said they had a "number of things on our radar".
"Really what is important to us in the centre of the family is hapū māmā, the mum, the baby, that whole whanau is really important. And we would want to tackle that.
"There is too much preventable and avoidable harm in our pregnancy or maternity care system in this country to our babies and our mums. That's not because we haven't got the most - we've got great, well qualified clinicians - what we need is a different system approach, and we need to get everyone around the table.
"And if I had endless money, we would do that end to end. We would do the data independently and transparently… we've got data collection, but it's not independent… And then we'd also look at action, research and advocacy to bring about change and put everyone around the table.
"Some of that's happening at the moment, but it's not the resources that we need, and I think we need a lot more transparency about this."
An image of a self swab for cervical cancer. Photo: Cancer Society
She said with better funding and strategies - such as elimination - cancers caused by the human papillomavirus could be eliminated "in our lifetime".
"That's really exciting. And there's a lot of people on this waka, including the Cancer Society, all the colleges, and I'm sure every wahine in this country, they don't want themselves to get cancer, and they don't want their children to get cancer. That's why they've got the taonga of a vaccination…
"I think we also forget that this is a nasty virus. It also causes a substantial amount of oral cancers and anal cancers and vaginal cancers, and guess what - we can prevent it by vaccinating.
"So there's a lot, a lot of things happening in the future that will make this even better for us."
Lawton was previously made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005 for services to women's health.
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