What a flurry of work to come back to last week, busy as per usual and an office full of energy and vibrancy with an influx of new, younger faster and enthusiastic kaimahi. Its great to be back! This time I get to come to work with a very happy healthy big baby boy. Saturday 20 January Isaac Toamanogi El-Shadan Tautolo was born. Most of you would have seen me growing towards the end of last year and hopefully you knew I was pregnant. Yesterday, baby joined Te Kakano and the National Coordination Services in meetings and now we are back on with Te Kakano updates and getting information and...

How do we engage people in discussing gambling harm? That seems to be the question on most of the workforce lips at the moment. Recently at a meeting, it was raised how do we increase people accessing gambling harm messages and support services. During this discussion, it became clear that we have to start looking through the different lenses to engage people. You might say 'what different lenses are there?'. The financial angle seems the obvious one, working with financial services to engage with people. But how do we look through other lenses and merge gambling harm to these?. Health...

This month NCS has kicked off creating an online Public Health Network to assist in more collaboration and support for the South Island Public Health Workforce.

I attended the Addiction Leadership 2018 hosted by Matua Raki in Parliament recently. It was good to see many of our Prevention and Minimising Gambling Harm Sector amongst the packed venue. For me, there was one poignant moment of the day in which a woman who leads a community programme helping youth read an emotional letter from a young boy who had committed suicide. It was heart-wrenching to listen to this boy’s last words to the world. He expressed how his addiction has hurt many people and that he can’t go on being such a screw-up. The hatred he felt towards himself for his addiction and...