Ngā uaratanga Our values

Our values ground our behaviour and guide our thinking. They help us make decisions that create better health outcomes for New Zealanders.

A spiral is created using the white space between the blue ellipses. The white space represents the space we need to make to truly hear what others have to say.. .

Whakarongo | Listen

Āta whakarongo kia puaki te ngākau aroha
We listen with intent and empathy to understand

Whakarongo means listening with more than your ears. It’s perceiving with all senses – listening with intent and empathy, listening to understand. We must seek out all voices to truly understand, and we must be ready to change our minds when needed, based on what we hear. With whakarongo shaping the way we communicate, people will trust us and know that we’ll engage with them in a meaningful way.

Behind the design

The whakarongo spiral represents the darkness the children were in while the world was created. Once light and life were born, the children needed all their senses to perceive their world and connect with each other.

The 2 koru are interlaced, to carry the weaving metaphor through to the design..

Tūhono | Connect

Kōtuitui kia piri, tūhono kia whakatatū te ara tika
We connect with people, communities, the health system and each other

Tūhono means that everything in the universe is connected. It’s a warm word that reminds us that relationships and connections are taonga and must be treasured. We combine tūhono with whakatatū, which means coming to an agreement or decision together. To help us find the best way forward for everyone, we must connect with people, communities, the health system and each other. We must see each other as people first, and tūhono with sincerity.

Behind the design

Two split koru or puhoro represent Tūhono. The curves embody people coming together – weaving their stories to create a new narrative.

The stepped pattern familiar from Māori meeting houses sits above a traditional triangle pattern (the tāniko).

Wānanga | Learn together

Ma te māhirahira ka whāwhāki te maramatanga
We draw on evidence and people’s experiences to improve

To keep growing and changing for the better, we must share knowledge and ideas to feed our appetite to learn. We must balance empirical evidence with the unique experiences people share, and use this to inform our mahi. Only by combining māhirahira (curiosity), whāwhāki (revelation), and maramatanga (insight), we can reveal the best way forward. We can learn together. We can wānanga.

Behind the design

The poutama design for Wānanga represents the progression of knowledge with the steps needed to reach the best outcomes. They are built on a tāniko, which reminds us that change occurs where people and events cross.

A stylised pattern that has a rounded head at the top and a central stalk, with lots of small koru like flourishes .

Māia | Be courageous

Tū te ihiihi, tū te wanawana, tū te wehiwehi
We challenge ourselves

Ihi, wana, and wehi are central to māia, capturing the joy and excitement of life and wonder and gratitude for the world itself. They ensure we face change with optimism, don’t avoid difficult conversations, and continue to challenge ourselves and each other. We must stand up when we see opportunities to do better. We must be courageous to deliver better health outcomes for New Zealanders.

Behind the design

The mango pare for Māia symbolises courage and resilience with the nose of the shark. It reminds us to persevere through challenges, to be courageous in our approach, and to always strive to be better.

Two little stylised creatures that are facing each other and joined together. .

Kaitiakitanga | Preserve, protect, and shelter our future

Hāpaitia te mana tangata hei whāriki mo nga uri whakatipu
We safeguard wellbeing for New Zealanders, now and for the future

Te Pātaka Whaioranga, our te reo Māori name, means ‘the storehouse of wellbeing’. Whaioranga describes recovering to good health and te pātaka symbolises the solid and reliable structure that safeguards supplies. For Pharmac, that’s supplies of medicines and medical devices. As kaitiaki of Te Pātaka Whaioranga, we play our part to preserve, protect, and shelter the future wellbeing of everyone in New Zealand. We whakarongo, tūhono and wānanga with māia to strengthen Te Pātaka Whaioranga.

Behind the design

The Kaitiakitanga symbol features the pekapeka, a taonga inspired by the native bat. Pekapeka act as a kaitiaki for the wearer and are passed down through generations to continue guardianship of the mauri.

The story of the values

Listen to Trevor Simpson (Kaituruki Māori – Director Māori) explain the meaning behind our values and how Pharmac reflects them in our work.

Trevor Simpson (Kaituruki Māori – Director Māori) explains the story behind Pharmac's values

View transcript

Kia ora koutou. My name's Trevor Simpson I'm the Kaituruki Māori Director at Te Pātaka Whaioranga - Pharmac. I'm here today to talk to you about the five values - Ngā Uaratanga o Te Pātaka Whaioranga that we've formed and that we are now all adhering to.

The values process itself started with a wānanga with all of staff involved in discussing what we thought that our values should be and what they should look like and that they should have the right feel. So we started that process with a series of wānanga, producing what we called mind maps. From there we went through a reductive process to bring those myriad of values down to the five key uaratanga that we have today.

From there, we formed a kaitiaki group that were to take those five values and to work on them some more to make sense of what they were in terms of the organisation and what we had hoped for the values and what they would do for our work. Te Pātaka, which literally means storehouse, was a term gifted to us by Papa Bill Kaua who's the organisational Kaumatua. And his thinking on this was that a pātaka represented, really well, the sort of work that we do as an organisation within the health system. And that was around having a storehouse of medicines and perhaps devices that we were going to draw from the pātaka to use in our everyday work and that included housing the values of the organisation - Ngā Uaratanga o Te Pātaka Whaioranga.

Whakarongo, the first value that we'll be talking about today, is about listen with intent. So from a Māori hauora perspective, whakarongo is the act of listening to someone with not only your mind, and your ears, and your physical self, but your heart. So someone who's really good at whakarongo is someone who can project that they not only hear what you're saying but that they care about you as an individual, as a person.

Tūhono, our second value, literally means to connect. So in our work we know how important it, it is, to connect with other people that are intimately concerned with the work we do, particularly around medicines and devices. And so in order to be really good at that we need to practice the skill of connecting with others, that's our stakeholders, staff within the organisation that play an important role in our work, as well as other people beyond this organisation - consumers etc - that are really concerned with what happens in our decision making process.

The third value that we're going to be talking about today is wānanga. So if you break that word down into its derivative parts, it comes back to the word wā, which is about time, space, knowledge, and everything in it. So from that broad perspective, we narrow it down to the work that we do here at Pātaka, at Te Pātaka Whaioranga and that's around gathering together the right people in the right room to talk about matters of importance to this organisation and you might be able to draw on the work that we do here in terms of making important decisions around medicines and devices.

The fourth value is Māia. Māia, loosely described, as being courageous and the work that we do at Te Pātaka Whaioranga - Pharmac sometimes requires that we do some difficult things here. So we draw on some Māori conceptualisation around ihi, wehi and wana. The word ihi, and we draw on the term ihi ihi, is around the rapture, the bliss, the euphoria of life. So this kind of gratefulness about being alive. The second word, wehi wehi, is derived from its, its particle word called wehi. That's about an experience of wonderment, about gratitude and about, think, a sense of awe about life itself. The third word, wanawana, I think, again, similar to the other two, but more around the thrill, the joy, and the excitement of life. So from a Māori concept of those terms, what we find is that it's really difficult to have māia and courage if you don't have those things in place and those are the key ingredients that you need in order to be courageous. As well as, we can draw on those terms to talk about hauora, wellbeing in general.

So the fifth value, Kaitiakitanga, is more or less around the notion of leaving a legacy for future generations. So for Māori, we think in terms of generations ahead, whether that be three, four, or five generations ahead and our obligations and responsibilities to those that are, yet, yet to be born. So it has a really important aspect of seriousness in terms of the work that we're doing now and what impact that might have on future generations.

So in summary, Ngā Uaratanga o Te Pātaka Whaioranga drives the work we do in terms of our engagement. It also drives the work that we're doing in decision making, but I think, more importantly, it's a driver and a guide for expected behaviours within this organisation