At times like these, it’s all hands on deck to ensure our essential services can keep serving our most vulnerable people.

Many areas of the CCN work have been paused to allow planning and funding leads to focus on areas of work, and to allow members of our programme team to be redeployed as needed.

For Julia Mead (pictured left) that means taking her perspective of all things rural to the Canterbury Hauora Coordination Hub, a role Julia has held since December 2021.

Julia has been working as the Rural Liaison for The Hub since December 2021 and is part of the planning and provision of services to the rural community. 

"It is rewarding being part of the Hub as I'm able keep the communities I work with informed.”

These communities include Ashburton Providers Collaboration, Rural Covid Coordination, Chatham Islands Leadership Group and for CCN, the Rural Health Workstream and Ashburton Service Level Alliance (ASLA).

Julia also has oversight of the Ashburton District vaccination programme, as part of her Facilitation role with ASLA.

"Ashburton's primary care providers have been proactively collaborating and working tirelessly to deliver the impressive vaccination results they have. It is great to be able to provide data trends and up-to-date information in this rapidly moving environment.

"Rural people are innovative, have a natural resilience and just get on with what is needed. They are pragmatic and hard working. 

"In this area, the many organisations come together with health providers to work with a real alliance mindset, which has definitely helped with rolling out the vaccination programme to their communities."

Julia has also been involved in the establishment of a Rapid Antigen Testing (RAT) site on the Chatham Islands while Koral Fitzgerald and Lucy Mason have been working to support the work around the Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) distribution across Canterbury.