Professor Sitaleki 'Ata'ata Finau

Professor Sitaleki 'Ata'ata Finau was born in Masilamea, Tonga. He was schooled in Tonga and New Zealand, and trained in Medicine at the University of Queensland. Since then he has a long and varied career in clinical medicine, public health, community health, epidemiology and research in Australia, New Zealand,Tonga, Fiji, and Hawai'i.

He was an HRC training fellow in epidemiology at Wellington Hospital, and has a post graduate diploma in Community Health from Otago University. He has also held fellowships from the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine and the Australasian Faculty of Public Health.

He is registered as public health specialist in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. Most recently he was Professor of Public Health at Fiji School of Medicine, Suva for five years until June 2006 when he became the first Director Pasifika at Massey University to (in his own words) put "Pacificans in Massey University and Massey in and among the Pacific populations".

Plenary Session: Evidence Review For Practice: Challenging relevance and objectivity for social action

Scientific evidence is often erroneously seen as quantitative, statistical and value-free but devoid of social construct. Therefore evidence-based practice (EBP), as compard to opinion-based practice (OPB), is assumed to be so objective and divorced from values and operating in a fuzzy warm contextual vacuum. This is akin to a person being considered as no more than a container of interacting chemicals controlled and mainted by electrical impulses.

This paper will contend that scientific endeavours are not value-free and incomplete without a social context. It will discuss the processes of constructing scientific evidence and the derivation fo EBP and OBP, especially in health where values laregly contribute to health risks, interventions and outcomes. Experiences among Pacificans will illustrate how evidence and science without values and outside a social construct is racist and contributes to inequities, injustices and health disparity. The recent evidence review on healthy eating social marketing will be a case in point for the presentation.