Transcript
DR RADILAITE CAMMOCK - The main outcome or result was in terms of women's awareness, so I measured awareness by asking women whether they had ever heard of a family planning method and if they had what types of methods they had heard about and the same for youth and I compared this between women who lived in Fiji and women who lived in New Zealand and what I found was that for women who lived in NZ they had a lower odd, so they had a reduced odd of actually being aware and of actually using, which was surprising because Fiji and NZ they represent two different developmental context and I wanted to see whether the patterns of awareness or youth differed given those context and I found that actually for us here in NZ who live in a developed country it's a lot worse in terms of odds around hearing or using family planning.
SELA JANE HOPGOOD - Why do you think is the reason behind that, why NZ Fijians don't have that much awareness when we live in a country where contraception is down the road in the pharmacy?
RC - Yeah it's available right? So the comparison with Fiji is also new. I mean usually you would be comparing like a minority ethnic group with the rest of the population. This project is a little bit different because we're looking at the same group of people in terms of ethnicity, indigenous Fijian in two different contexts. In the case of Fiji, women often get this information when they're already in hospital, so women often give birth in the hospital and they're normally given family planning information postnatally, so they are already in there and then the nurse comes around and gives them this information. In NZ, what I found was that women were often also getting this information from health professionals, but it was most likely through GPs, so women are having to access, they're actually having to go out and seek this service instead of having it just be given to them in a hospital like we have in Fiji, so access actually is something very important here because even though the services are available, how women are going out to seek them, are they? And if they are, what drives those decisions?
SJH - What about cultural factors?
RC - I had a few participants who talked about their experience, coming here to NZ and actually being confronted with people at school talking about sex, having sex, talking about all sorts of different things along reproduction and for her although it was quite confronting and uncomfortable, she actually appreciated the honesty around it all. There's definitely a balance here especially if you are living in NZ is they don't want it to be at one extreme where you can't have these conversations, but they would like somewhere sort of to the middle where this information is treated respectfully instead of promoting it like if you want to have a good time and not worry.
SJH - The data was collected in 2012 and 2013, so it's a while ago...
RC - Yeah it's about five years old...
SJH - Yeah so is there a reason why it's been released now?
RC - It was part of my PhD, so it tells you how long it took me to actually analyse and get this information out. The paper that published is actually in the Australia/New Zealand medical journal of public health and that was published at the beginning of this year, but I submitted it towards the middle of last year, so there was a delay here in terms of this information coming out, but I have presented this work in Fiji, to the Ministry of Health, they have a report, I think in 2016 they got the report on this.
