When the University of Otago opened its new dental school building in 2019, Emeritus Professor John Broughton could point to exactly how far the profession had come since his own graduation: after him, twelve years passed before another Māori student enrolled in dentistry at Otago, and by 2019 a single intake held more than double figures, as Stuff later reported. Emeritus Professor John Renata Broughton, CNZM, who spent 47 years building Māori oral health services at Otago and who also wrote one of New Zealand theatre's most travelled plays, died in Dunedin on September 15, 2026. He was 79.

He was born in Hastings in 1947 and raised there, attending Hastings Boys' High School before studying microbiology at Massey University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1971. He then spent two years working at the Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu, Hawaii, before returning home to study dentistry, graduating from the University of Otago with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 1977 and working afterward as a dental house surgeon at Dunedin Hospital. He also served for decades as a commissioned officer in the New Zealand Territorial Force, service for which he was later awarded the Efficiency Decoration.

In 1989 Broughton took up a lecturer's post in Māori health within Otago's Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, tasked with building a hauora Māori curriculum into the university's health professional courses, according to the University of Otago. The following year he drove the creation of Te Whare Kaitiaki, a whānau dental clinic he ran for more than 25 years on a kaupapa Māori model. He was proud that nine in ten children from Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ōtepoti who used the clinic reached their teenage years without a filling: "I am very proud of the fact that we got 90 per cent of the tamariki ... who chose to access our dental service, through to their secondary dentition without a filling in their mouths. And the majority were like that when they were 16 or 17 years of age," he told the university in 2020.

His second career began almost by accident. While studying at Otago in 1988 he joined a playwriting course run by Roger Hall, and within three years he had written Michael James Manaia, a one person play about a Māori Vietnam War veteran that premiered at Wellington's Downstage Theatre in 1991. First performed by actor Jim Moriarty, it toured to the Edinburgh Festival and was still being restaged more than two decades later, with Theatreview recording a 2012 revival that played the New Zealand International Arts Festival and toured to Auckland and Melbourne, followed by a further season at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre in 2013. The play won Broughton the Dominion Sunday Times Bruce Mason Playwriting Award in 1990.

He founded and directed the Ngāi Tahu Māori Health Research Unit from 1996 to 2011, completed a PhD on Māori oral health service provision in 2006, and was promoted to full professor in 2012, serving jointly in preventive and social medicine and as Associate Dean Māori for the School of Dentistry. In the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori health, theatre and the community; his official citation credited him with writing or co-producing more than 22 theatre productions staged in schools, marae and prisons as well as on mainstream stages.

Away from the university, Broughton chaired the Araiteuru Marae Council from 1983 to 1988 and remained a life member, sat on the Māori Advisory Committee of the Otago Museum from 2000, and co-curated the exhibition Te Ao Māori: Māori Treasures from the Otago Museum when it opened at the Shanghai Museum in 2011, where he also gave a public lecture. He chaired the New Zealand Institute for Cancer Research board and served as a trustee of the Montecillo Veterans' Home and Hospital. According to Stuff, he had an intense love of rugby, could name every dentist who had played for the All Blacks, and wore his Otago University Rugby Club tie most days, having served for years as the club's secretary.

Broughton retired from Otago on 30 June 2020 after 47 years associated with the university and was made Emeritus Professor for his distinguished teaching, research and service. He remained close to the university afterward, continuing to provide a welcome at almost every graduation ceremony, according to RNZ. In late 2025 Otago conferred on him an Honorary Doctor of Science for his contribution to Māori health services and to teaching and research. "I am very honoured to receive this degree; extremely honoured," he said. "I loved empowering young Māori and helping them see themselves as future health professionals."

The University of Otago told staff that Broughton died on the afternoon of September 15, 2026, surrounded by his whānau. Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson said "the many gifts he had, he shared with intelligence and grace, enhancing our collective understanding and contributing to a better Aotearoa," adding that "the ora John planted will continue to bloom, as it was sown in every clinician who benefited from his mahi."

What Broughton leaves in Dunedin can be counted. The Ngāi Tahu Māori Health Research Unit he founded still sits inside the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine. Te Whare Kaitiaki treated whānau on the model he built for a quarter century. Michael James Manaia remains in New Zealand's theatre repertoire three decades after Jim Moriarty first spoke its lines at Downstage. And the cohorts of dental and medical students who studied oranga niho because he insisted it belonged in the curriculum carry, in their own clinics now, the work he started as a young lecturer in 1989.