Ms Eseta Finau, ONZM, Auckland
For services to health and the Pacific community. Ms Eseta Finau is President and spokesperson of the Tongan Nurses Association of New Zealand. She has spent much of her working life improving nursing services for Pacific people, and especially Auckland’s large Tongan community. She is involved in a wide range of church and community health initiatives and serves on the boards of the Pasifika Medical Association and the Tongan Health Society. In 2006 she helped organise the first Tongan Health Professionals Conference. With other Pacific nurses, she has been responsible for forming the Pacific Nurses’ section of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation. The tireless, and largely voluntary, efforts of Ms Finau and other Tongan nurses in Auckland helped ensure the success of Langimalie, New Zealand’s first ethnic-specific health service, which was launched in 1998, and now has a patient base of more than 6,500. Ms Finau received the Pasifika Medical Association Service Award in 2008.