Rate My Professor Ben Gray

Associate Professor Ben Gray serves in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington. He is a graduate of the University of Otago, having earned his MBChB from the inaugural class of the Wellington Clinical School. Gray also holds a Master of Bioethics and Health Law, completed in May 2014, with a dissertation titled “How does the concept of cultural competence affect the practice of bioethics and health law.” He joined the department in 2006 as a Senior Lecturer in General Practice. Throughout his career, he worked as a general practitioner for more than 30 years, beginning in Waitara, Taranaki, where he served a significant Māori population, and later at Newtown Union Health Service, which caters to a diverse community including numerous refugees from around the world. These practices developed notable strengths in long-term condition management, cross-cultural care, and interprofessional practice. Gray retired from clinical practice in 2020.

Gray's research interests encompass the use of interpreters in medical consultations, cultural competence, long-term condition management, interprofessional practice, and reflective practice in undergraduate education. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. In his teaching role, he acts as Module Convener for Professional Development and Ethics for fourth-year, fifth-year, and Trainee Intern students, delivers lectures and tutorials on professionalism and ethics, teaches in general practice modules on long-term conditions and teamwork/interprofessionalism, offers postgraduate courses on cultural competence, and convenes the Pacific Health paper. He maintains active involvement in the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law and regularly presents at the Otago Bioethics Centre Seminar Series. His expertise includes cross-cultural bioethics, parental refusal of treatment, euthanasia, clinical ethics, research ethics, pandemic ethics, primary care practice organisation, and principles of cross-cultural care in Māori and Pacific health contexts. Key publications include “Consent for teaching: How to learn to care for people who lack capacity” (2025), “How to balance patient rights, safety and choice of provider with the need to train future doctors” (Medical Research Archives, 2025), “The development of the profession of interpreting and translating” (Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Translators & Interpreters Conference, 2025), and “Measuring low-density lipoprotein cholesterol” (New Zealand Medical Journal, 2025).