New Zealanders this week were debating a thorny health care issue — whether ethnicity should be a factor in determining when patients get surgery.

It turns out that in some parts of Auckland, the country’s largest city at 1.4 million people, clinicians have been using an algorithm to adjust where patients sit on elective surgery waitlists. Clinical need remains the top factor, but the algorithm also takes into account how long patients have been on the waitlist, where they live, their financial circumstances, and their ethnicity.

Indigenous Māori and Pacific Island patients are given a higher priority on the list, pushing down white New Zealanders and other ethnicities. The idea is to balance out longstanding inequities in the publicly funded health system.

“At the moment, there is clear evidence Māori, Pacific, rural and low-income communities have been discriminated against by the health system,” Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told reporters.