Mrs Stanbrook-Mason's involvement with health started when she was a 15-year-old volunteer helping older people in the former Newcombe Ward. She trained as a nurse in Taranaki and did most of her placements at Whanganui Hospital.
After training she worked for six months in a Thai refugee camp, before getting a job in the hospital's emergency department. She was there for eight years, with nursing stints in Cambodia and Australia, before taking on a series of management roles.
She endorses the whanau ora approach to health - putting patients and their families first, and wants the new board to maintain that momentum. And she has a special interest in health for older people with dementia.
Whanganui District Health Board has a lot of challenges, she said, in providing for an elderly and low socio-economic population. But it deserves congratulations for cutting its budget deficit without cutting any services.
One of the next challenges will be to meet government's strategy of moving health provision increasingly out of hospitals and into the community.
"How do we transition that without the community feeling services are being reduced?"
It's going to require lots of co-operation, but she said staff are up for it.
"I see some of the innovation and creativity that our staff have, if you give them a challenge in the best interest of consumers and the community."
