Co-designing Pacific interventions: A Research Journey

In November 2025 our Pacific Research Collective delivered an invited plenary presentation entitled Co-designing Pacific interventions: A Research Journey at the NAPCRG annual meeting in Atlanta, USA. Our team were Rose Lamont, the leader of the community group Pacific Peoples Advisory Group; GP Dr Maryann Heather, member of the Pacific Practice-Based Research Network; and University of Auckland researchers Associate Professor Malakai Ofanoa, Research Fellows Samuela Ofanoa and Siobhan Tu’akoi, and myself. Continue reading →

Live from NAPCRG 2025: Dr. Felicity Goodyear-Smith

In this first episode of the 2025 Live from the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) conference series, we interview Dr. Felicity Goodyear-Smith. She received her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Auckland, where she now serves as Professor and Goodfellow Postgraduate Chair of General Practice and Primary Care. A prolific author with more than 360 peer-reviewed publications, 11 books, and 30 book chapters, she joined the Annals of Family Medicine Editorial Advisory Board in 2024 and has delivered several NAPCRG plenaries, including this year’s.

Recorded the day before her plenary, the episode previews the talk she and her research collective were about to give, which tells the story of a Pacific co-design research journey that began with a 2016 PaCE workshop and led to the formation of a Pacific community group and a Pacific Practice-Based Research Network in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Guided by Pacific research frameworks such as fa’afaletui and the Fonofale model of holistic health, their work involves community groups in every step of the research process and includes projects addressing gout and rheumatic fever.
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NAPCRG Distinguished Research Mentor Award

Presentation ceremony at the NAPCRG 2024 Annual Meeting, Québec City, Canada

The Distinguished Mentor Award is intended to acknowledge outstanding mentorship. The recipient must be a NAPCRG member and contribute to the development of other researchers. The distinguished mentor will epitomize mentorship. They will demonstrate support, guidance and promotion of their mentee(s) which occurs beyond their job description.
NAPCRG

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Advocacy is not justice: diagnosing child abuse

First published at openinquiry.nz August 16, 2023

Felicity Goodyear-Smith

Child abuse paediatricians are doctors trained in diagnosing child abuse. They advocate for abused and neglected children and for programmes to prevent child mistreatment, and they consider whether conditions bringing children into hospital might have been caused by abuse. However there are situations where over-zealous paediatricians, in the desire to protect children, wrongly equate specific physical findings as evidence of abuse, with devastating consequences to children and their families.

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Shaken baby syndrome needs a rethink

FIRST PUBLISHED JUL 16, 2023 at Newsroom
Felicity Goodyear-Smith is a professor in general practice at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.

SOCIAL ISSUES

Shaken baby syndrome needs a rethink

The term Abusive Head Trauma (Shaken Baby Syndrome) presupposes an action with malicious intent. These emotive labels should have no place masquerading as a medical diagnosis.
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All the ways you didn’t know you could catch ‘The Clap’ (it’s not just sex)

by Annemarie Quill
First published on Stuff 05:25, May 03 2023


Gonorrhoea can be spread by kissing without any sexual activity, experts say (file photo).

A sexually transmitted disease on the rise in Aotearoa, commonly referred to as ‘the clap’, can be caught from kissing, shared towels and even flies.

And government health advice, which says it can only be transmitted via sexual activity, needs to be updated, experts say.
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