Counselling services needed a shake-up in how they are delivered needing to suit the customer and not the clinician/counsellor. Many whānau simply cannot get time off work to attend a (face-to-face) consult during the day nor do many counselling services have the cultural cognisance to maintain a culturally-led mental health call with customers who are of Māori heritage should needing to invoke a customers world-view be critical to helping them. eTalk was an existing phone-based counselling service that when re-branded could address these issues.
Joseph worked with the service design team at the National Telehealth Service to design what a culturally-led counselling service needed to ‘experience’ like inside a call and in turn needed to look and feel like to resonate to Māori to reach out and welcome them in. With a brief anchored around a counselling service for you when you are available Joseph and the working group landed on the name ‘Puawaitanga’ meaning to blossom, to flourish to break-through.
Puawaitanga is a phone and web based service supporting Kiwis to improve their emotional wellbeing - their hauora. The service is an alternative to face-to-face counselling for Kiwi’s facing challenges to accessing traditional face-to-face counselling.
