The Mauri Ora Window is an innovative approach for health practitioners who want to improve their cultural engagement and address inequitable health outcomes for indigenous people. Healthcare quality is a key driver of health inequities and this begins at the point of engagement. Mauri Ora is a friendly, easy-to-apply tool to trigger routine best practice engagement skills.

Mauri Ora is a key concept in Te Ao Māori, the Māori worldview. It describes a state of flourishing. What if, in a 20-minute encounter with a patient, you could make a difference that would bring them back, build trust, show you care about what matters to them and remind them of their own power to make decisions about their health?

Every encounter is an opportunity to lift others and bring hope into the patient experience. The Mauri Ora Window is not a linear set of points but rather a mental checklist and behaviour guide sharpening our conscious consideration of others by making us more aware of ourselves.

The Mauri Ora Framework

The Mauri Ora framework focuses on the patient-provider interaction with a checklist of seven points that create a Mauri Ora encounter.

These points can happen in any order – the tool triggers routine best practice engagement, nurturing optimal therapeutic rapport in interactions with all patients.

1. Connect

   Connect to the patient with a simple Māori greeting and correctly pronounce their name. Do this before you do anything else, as this creates an authentic connection in a few moments.

2. Be happy to see the patient

   Demonstrate the essence of Mauri Ora, that you are happy to see them. Mauri Ora is not a tool to make people feel happy, but rather an opportunity to express that you are thrilled to see them. This subtle difference communicates a sense of value. People need to feel like they are going to have a positive, meaningful and relevant health experience with you. The encounter with the patient is to not skip over the value of deepening connection, to really listen, to really focus on them and to breathe life, hope and encouragement to lift patients so they are permitted to make decisions that advance their progress to positive health benefit. Then connect to create a shared agenda. Researchers estimate that setting an agenda with patients adds just 1.9 minutes to the length of an average visit.

3. Reflect on unconscious bias

   The next step in the Mauri Ora framework involves the cultural competency to reflect on any unconscious bias, judgements or stereotypes you might have. Many may argue that it is difficult to know when you have an unconscious bias because it is a behaviour expressed more automatically and less as a result of our conscious awareness. How can we know we are responding to an unconscious bias when it is unconscious? Our unconscious bias is brought to our awareness through our irritations. Our unconscious bias has suddenly become apparent to the patient. As a result of a judgement that we now wear on our face, or act out in our subtle separation from them, it is now obvious to the patient our most private and personal opinion is now on display and left undetected may be used to filter clinical decisions.

4. Be responsive

   Fourth is clinical action that is being responsive to the person, place, process, and pace. The tone of our voice or movements, our body language and eye contact are very important. Rely less on words and raise the consciousness of the nonverbal cues. It’s essential not to rush.

5. Stay connected

   Fifth is to stay connected and in relationship with the patient, being mindful of the power difference and centring them as the decision-maker for their care.

6. Share information to empower

   Sixth is sharing information to empower patients and their families to take the lead in their health journey.

7. Continually evaluate, learn, improve and change

   Lastly, continually evaluate and learn from the process, sharpen your cultural competency, and take responsibility for improvement and change.