Petra Bagust

speaker

3,317 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

Petra Bagust’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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Grey Areas with Petra Bagust · Pushed to my limits | Sir Ashley Bloomfield · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, I'm glad you've admitted it to me.

I promise not to tell anyone.

I'm trying to picture, actually, somebody saying something to you and you're going, go away.

I don't want to hear about it.

No, it's hard.

A constructive criticism is hard.

Can you please give us an every person's understanding of public health?

Because you went from being a house surgeon and...

Libby was a GP or was she, what was her role?

Yeah, so we both did our house surgeon years and we worked here and in the UK and then Libby started down the general practice training program and did that for a bit and then decided it wasn't for her.

So she then moved more into women's health and worked for family planning, so reproductive health, women's health.

So that's her sort of area of specialty.

I decided, and public health is a non-clinical specialty and the way I think about it is it's about looking after the health and well-being of populations and groups in the population rather than individuals and so it's thinking about the patterns of disease in populations and then working out what does this mean and what can we do about it and

So most of my work I've spent, contrary to the COVID experience, I actually spent in the area of what's called non-communicable diseases.

So tobacco control, smoking, diet, physical activity, the big diseases like diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular disease, which is the greatest burden of disease in most countries, including Aotearoa.

So that's where I really spent most of my time.

And I love the intersection between public health and public policy, because if you're in the right place at the right time, and it's often about timing, you can be quite influential and you get some lovely wins sometimes.

have you got a one that you can tell us about i have got one yeah that that really sustains me and in in many respects it's kind of the thing i'm most proud of from my career is um the the reduction in smoking rates amongst year 10 students in altera so in 2000 when i sort of started working in syria 37 of maori girls year 10 so that's age 14 15 37 smoked daily

There were big inequities, that was the highest group, and it's now under 5%, sort of 3%, 2%, 3%.

So there's that, plus of course Māori women we know had not just the highest smoking rate in Aotearoa, but one of the highest smoking rates in the world of any population group, and that's declined substantially.

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