Dame Teuila Percival, of Auckland, DNZM, for services to health and the Pacific community
Dame Teuila Percival is a paediatrician and researcher who has been a strong advocate for Pacific children’s health in New Zealand and the wider Pacific region for 30 years. Dame Teuila is a founding member and Deputy Chair of South Seas Healthcare (SSH), a community health service providing care to Pacific peoples in Auckland since 1999. She chaired SSH from 2014 to 2022, growing the healthcare provider to be the largest of its kind in Ōtara and Papatoetoe, providing services to more than 120,000 people. She was a founding member of the Pacific Medical Association (PMA) in 1996 and is a past president. Through SSH and PMA, she was a leading clinician for the 2009 Samoa tsunami disaster response and provided paediatric support in Vanuatu following Cyclone Pam in 2015 and the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa. She helped create the Mana Kids clinics at 88 primary and intermediate schools in Ōtara, Māngere, Manurewa, Franklin and Papakura, with SSH a registered clinic based in the nine largest South Auckland schools. She served as a member of the World Health Organisation’s Emergency Medical Teams Maternal Newborn Child Health Technical Advisory Group between 2017 and 2019. She has been the Director of Moana Connect, researching and advocating for Pacific women’s and children’s health in New Zealand and the Pacific region. Dame Teuila was a Board member of the Health Promotion Agency from 2018 to 2022 and chaired the Auckland DHB Community and Public Health Advisory Committee from 2020 to 2022.