Sir Maui Pomare's health reforms helped cut the maternal mortality rate. (Alexander Turnbull Library)
Sir Maui Pomare's health reforms helped cut the maternal mortality rate. (Alexander Turnbull Library)
For the second year in a row, Dr Maui Pomare features as our New Zealander of the Year, this time for his great work as Health Minister, specifically in pushing through reforms that helped cut the rate of young mothers dying from infections contracted during childbirth.
He had been mademinister in 1923 and, from 1924, promoted his campaign for safe maternity through the use of aseptic techniques, antenatal care and better midwifery training.
There was, says Graham Butterworth in the DNZB, resistance from the medical profession through disagreements over whether such aseptic techniques were necessary in childbirth and concerns about the cost.
Under Pomare's scheme cheaper, more efficient sterilisers were devised, standard asepsis techniques implemented and the number of maternity beds in public hospitals greatly increased.
When Pomare began his initiative, the Herald reported him as saying "The campaign to reduce maternal mortality undertaken by the department will, I believe, have appreciable results.
"I will not be satisfied until the rate is comparable with that for infant mortality, which in New Zealand is the lowest in the world."
By 1927 he was on his way to achieving that goal. Butterworth reports that puerperal sepsis, which had been one of the prime causes of the deaths of young mothers, fell dramatically after this year.
