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ObjectivesTo provide a sociodemographic profile of students enrolled in their first year of a health professional pre-registration programme offered within New Zealand (NZ) tertiary institutions.DesignObservational, cross-sectional study. Data were sought from NZ tertiary education institutions for all eligible students accepted into the first ‘professional’ year of a health professional programme for the 5-year period 2016–2020 inclusive. Variables of interest: gender, citizenship, ethnicity, rural classification, socioeconomic deprivation, school type and school socioeconomic scores. Analyses were carried out using the R statistics software.SettingAotearoa NZ.ParticipantsAll students (domestic and international) accepted into the first ‘professional’ year of a health professional programme leading to registration under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003.ResultsNZ’s health workforce pre-registration students do not reflect the diverse communities they will serve in several important dimensions. There is a systematic under-representation of students who identify as Māori and Pacific, and students who come from low socioeconomic and rural backgrounds. The enrolment rate for Māori students is about 99 per 100 000 eligible population and for some Pacific ethnic groups is lower still, compared with 152 per 100 000 for NZ European students. The unadjusted rate ratio for enrolment for both Māori students and Pacific students versus ‘NZ European and Other’ students is approximately 0.7.ConclusionsWe recommend that: (1) there should be a nationally coordinated system for collecting and reporting on the sociodemographic characteristics of the health workforce pre-registration; (2) mechanisms be developed to allow the agencies that fund tertiary education to base their funding decisions directly on the projected health workforce needs of the health system and (3) tertiary education funding decisions be based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the foundational constitutional agreement between the Indigenous people, Māori and the British Crown signed in 1840) and have a strong pro-equity focus.

Background The lack of diversity in the health workforce is partly due to selection criteria for health professional programmes that have not selected students from a wide range of backgrounds. Consequently, health care professionals from minority groups and lower socio‐economic backgrounds are under‐represented in the workforce. Approach The Socioeconomic Equity (EQ) support programme aims to increase the participation, retention and academic success of students from low socio‐economic communities studying in health professional programmes at the University of Otago. At the start of the academic year, students who had attended a secondary school from a low socio‐economic community were invited to take part in the EQ Programme. This includes group workshops on study skills, guidance from peer mentors, subject specific academic support, one‐on‐one course advice and pastoral support and activities to enhance self‐esteem and self‐efficacy. Evaluation Comparing the first two years of the EQ project with the previous year, there was an increase in the percentage of students from schools in low socio‐economic communities that passed HSFY. It was also found that more EQ students were offered places in health professional programmes than in the previous year. Implications The percentage of students passing HSFY has increased, and importantly, the percentage of students from low socio‐economic backgrounds entering professional health programmes has doubled. This is a small start to building a health workforce that fairly reflects people from all communities.

Aotearoa New Zealand is a small, island nation located on the rim of Oceania. Since colonisation by British settlers in the mid-1800s, the internationalisation of higher education (HE) in Aotearoa New Zealand has reflected shifting notions of nationhood – from an extension of Great Britain, to a (separate) bicultural nation, to a player in the global knowledge economy. Since the late 1980s, internationalisation policy has reflected the primacy of market concerns; the internationalisation of HE has been imagined primarily as a means to attract export revenue and human capital to Aotearoa New Zealand, and to increase brand recognition. However, internationalisation, as the movement of people and knowledge between places, can also be seen as pre-dating the development of nations, particularly in the Oceania context.Within mātauranga Māori, or Māori (indigenous) epistemological traditions, place is central to identity. To be human is to be part of something bigger than oneself; care for the land is care both for ancestors and the wellbeing of future generations. In this paper, we (re)consider internationalised HE in light of three questions that are central to mātauranga Māori: “Who am I? What is this world that I exist in? What am I to do?” (Royal, 2012, p. 35). After tracing the connections between internationalisation, colonisation, and nationhood in Aotearoa New Zealand,we consider how attention to Māori place-based epistemologies and values drawn from mātauranga Māori might challenge, stretch and ground contemporary internationalisation policies and practices in Aotearoa New Zealand.