Ākenehi Hei

Ākenehi Hei, sometimes called Agnes Hei, was a Māori district nurse and midwife in New Zealand, born around 1878 at Te Kaha in the eastern Bay of Plenty. She was educated at Te Kaha Native School, the Ōpōtiki convent school and St Joseph's Māori Girls' College in Napier, began as an assistant nurse and dresser at Napier Hospital in 1901, qualified as a nurse in June 1908 and gained her midwifery qualification at St Helens Hospital in Christchurch that December. She is recorded as the first Māori to become a qualified nurse. The Department of Public Health employed her to nurse Māori during a typhoid epidemic, and she worked at several places on the North Island in 1909 and 1910, including villages on the Whanganui River where she isolated patients in a makeshift hospital at Jerusalem. She died of typhoid at Gisborne Hospital on 28 November 1910 after nursing typhoid patients, among them her niece. The nursing journal Kai Tiaki called her death a serious loss to her people, and she is remembered as a pioneer who combined Māori and non-Māori practices and values in her nursing.