Jacquie Kidd

Jacqueline Dianne Kidd (Ngāpuhi) is a Māori academic, and is a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology, specialising in Māori health and anti-racism in health practices and processes.

Academic career
Kidd is affiliated to Ngapuhi through her mother, although her father was born in England of Irish heritage, and came to New Zealand in the 1950s with Wirth's Circus, where he worked with horses. The family moved around a lot when Kidd was growing up, but historically she is connected to Parawhenua and Rāwhitiroa marae. When she left school Kidd would have liked to be a journalist, but had failed school certificate. Kidd married, and by the time her marriage ended had two young children. She then qualified as a nurse at Otago Polytechnic, completing both bachelor and master of nursing degrees. Kidd completed a PhD titled Aroha mai: nurses, nursing and mental illness at the University of Auckland. Kidd then joined the faculty of the University of Auckland as a senior lecturer, leaving in 2019 to join Auckland University of Technology, where she was promoted to associate professor in 2020 and to full professor in 2023. She researches anti-racism in health services, cultural health literacy, and for fifteen years has been involved in cancer research.

Kidd says her politicisation began when she was exposed to racism during her nursing training, when a lecturer talked about Māori teen pregnancies during a paper on the social makeup of New Zealand. She says "That’s when I think I started to develop this anger and outrage at what people were being taught about us".

Kidd is the equity lead on a five-year Health Research Council-funded project to explore interventions for osteoarthritis, led by Haxby Abbott at University of Otago.

Kidd was diagnosed with bowel cancer at the age of 58. The national New Zealand bowel cancer screening programme is available from the age of 60, despite pressure to reduce the age for Māori, who suffer greater rates of cancers, poorer prognoses, and die on average seven years earlier than non-Māori. The age of eligibility for free screening was dropped to 50 for Pacific and Māori people from late 2023.

Kidd was a finalist in the 2017 Waikato District Health Board Medical Science Awards.