Auckland battler Moira Macnab has made a name for herself for taking on medical fights on behalf of clients who need a voice. But when it comes to misadventure in her own family, she is not one to complain, as she tells Rachel Grunwell.
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Tomorrow morning, Auckland lawyer Moira Macnab will go to court to find out why Brenda Moore, a 42-year-old mother, was able to commit suicide in the grounds of the mental health unit that was caring for her.
And Macnab wants to make sure it never happens again.
Macnab,
a former critical care nurse, is used to taking on the medical establishment on behalf of grieving families who may not understand the system or the medical jargon.
She took on the controversial Muliaga case, representing the Muliaga children whose mother Folole - at home with an oxygen machine - died three hours after a Mercury Energy contractor cut the power because of an overdue bill.
Macnab hopes the changes following the Muliaga case will mean no other cash-strapped Kiwi will have their life endangered by having the power disconnected, and that families will be better-informed about sick loved-ones.
It is answers, and change, she will be looking for this week during a three-day coroner's hearing in the Hamilton District Court into the death of social worker Brenda Moore, found last December in the grounds of the Henry Bennett Centre at Waikato Hospital.
Representing the family, Macnab will seek answers on a string of issues, including how Moore was able to go missing from the centre and why hazards were not taken away.
The family also wants assurances another similar tragedy will not occur.
Mother-of-one Moore, who worked at Middlemore Hospital and Thames Hospital, sought help in August last year, complaining of burnout, depression, relationship issues and exhaustion. Three months later, she became a voluntary patient under the Mental Health Act. But two days after being admitted, Moore was allegedly told by a doctor she could catch a bus home.
On December 11, Brenda tried to take her life and was taken to Thames Hospital, where she was sectioned.
The next day she was admitted to the Henry Bennett Centre in Hamilton - where her family believed she would be safe for the five days' forced care.
But Brenda disappeared on December 13. Her body was found 25 hours later in the centre's grounds by a member of the public.
Although Macnab can't talk specifically about the case before the hearing, she says there should be a national inquiry into mental health care, arguing that too many people die while in care.
"There needs to be a major re-write of mental health services in New Zealand," she says.
Macnab says small inquiries are being held nationwide, but not an overall look at how to prevent the many deaths each year and cater better to the growing problem.
While Macnab understands her clients' need for official explanations over medical failings, she has never felt pushed to seek those answers herself about her own family.
Both her parents died after a degree of medical misadventure and misdiagnosis. She claims her father, Colin Macnab, a former lawyer and coroner, died last year after being "left to languish" in a South Island hospital. She claims: substandard care in dealing with his cancer, doctors not operating quickly enough and an ill-fitting colostomy bag made his "gut rot" and resulted in septicemia.
"I never made a complaint about it," she says, matter-of-factly.
In her mother Joy Macnab's case, medical professionals told her she was experiencing a racy heart because she was "stressed" over the sudden death of her daughter Janet in a climbing accident in Fiordland in December 1995.
Five months later Joy died. It was later determined she had had a series of heart attacks and had not undergone correct tests to diagnose the problem.
"I didn't complain over that either... I guess some people really need to do things [take legal action] and others do not. For me, it wasn't the right thing to do," she says.
But in her clients' cases she has relentlessly chased answers and justice. Her argument against medical professionals is not so much about the mistakes themselves but about the "cover up" which can often follow.
She believes if mistakes are made, families should be promptly made aware of the full facts and health boards should act with integrity.
That way, she says, families and loved ones can heal more quickly and move on.