Category: Health

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

The Government Policy Statement on Health 2024-27 is the public statement of what Government expects the health system to deliver and achieve, and how success will be measured, monitored, and reported. 

The GPS sets the direction for the health system as a whole and incorporates the Government’s priorities. It sets the expectations for health entities to make sure they are working towards common goals that matter for New Zealanders. 

The GPS ties in with the Health Targets launched by Minister of Health Hon Dr Shane Reti in February 2024. 

The development of the GPS was informed by insights gained from extensive public consultation undertaken to inform the development of the New Zealand Health Strategy and associated Pae Ora | Healthy Futures strategies last year. 

The GPS also sets clear parameters for the New Zealand Health Plan, which will be published by Health New Zealand in 2024. 

The GPS 2024-27 sets out five priority areas for the health system.

• Access – ensuring all New Zealanders have equitable access to the health care services they need, no matter where they live.
• Timeliness – making sure all New Zealanders can access these services in a prompt and efficient way.
• Quality – ensuring New Zealand’s health care and services are safe, easy to navigate, understandable and welcoming to users, and are continuously improving.
• Workforce – having a skilled and culturally capable workforce who are accessible, responsive, and supported to deliver safe and effective health care. 
• Infrastructure – ensuring that the health system is resilient and has the digital and physical infrastructure it needs to meet people’s needs now and the future.  

The GPS also outlines the Minister for Mental Health’s priorities for mental health, addiction and suicide prevention, which align strongly with the overall health system priorities. 

Each priority area in the GPS includes a set of key measures, focused on the desired changes. Health entities will report regularly against these measures. The Ministry of Health will report publicly on the results of these GPS measures every year. 
 

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

In 2023 the Chief Allied Health Professions Officer convened Sector Reference Groups (SRGs) for 14 allied health professions. Each SRG was composed of a wide range of representatives from across the sector, including employers, employees, unions, regulators and professional bodies, educators, Tāngata Whenua profession-specific groups, and students.

The purpose of the SRGs was to understand the unique contribution of each profession to achieving the aims of the Pae Ora legislation, as well as to understand key barriers and opportunities to realising each profession’s full potential to contribute to the aims of Pae Ora.

Validated information from each SRG has been collated into this report. In addition to this profession-specific information, this report provides a high level summary of shared opportunities and barriers which were identified across many allied health professions.

The Hauora Haumi Allied Health Report is intended to be a living document which serves as a point of reference to inform stakeholders about the breadth and depth of knowledge and skill contained within hauora haumi | allied health professions. It serves as a starting point and will be iteratively updated to include more hauora haumi | allied health professions over time.

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

Summary

The HIV Monitoring Plan sets out 52 indicators that that will be used to monitor New Zealand’s progress towards achieving the goals, targets, and overarching vision of the National HIV Action Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand 2023-2030 (the HIV Action Plan).

The vision of the HIV Action Plan is ‘an Aotearoa New Zealand where HIV transmission is eliminated and all people living with HIV have healthy lives fee from stigma and discrimination’.

To monitor progress towards achieving this overarching vision, indicators have been developed for each of the following five goals:

1. reduced number of new locally acquired HIV infections
2. improved Māori health and wellbeing in relation to HIV by delivering on our Tiriti o Waitangi obligations
3. decreased mortality and the negative consequences of HIV on health and wellbeing
4. decreased experiences of stigma and discrimination for people living with HIV
5. increased equity in relation to all HIV goals and objectives.

This HIV Monitoring Plan will be reviewed periodically to ensure it is up to date and aligned with the latest priorities and available data.

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

This report outlines and compares regulatory approaches to natural health products (NHPs) in Australia, Canada, the EU, UK, USA and China.

For the purpose of this report, NHPs are a group of health and wellness products. They include nutritional supplements and products used in traditional healing practices. They are mostly derived from natural ingredients but can also contain synthetic equivalents (e.g. ascorbic acid for vitamin C and folic acid for the B vitamin, folate). They come in edible and inedible forms (e.g. tablets, powders, creams and inhalants). Examples include nutritional supplements (e.g. vitamin E, magnesium and sports supplements), herbal products (e.g. echinacea tablets, St John’s Wort capsules, and kawakawa balm), and animal products (e.g. deer velvet and fish oil capsules).

The report also covers regulation of homeopathy in Germany and Ayurveda in India.

Information in this report was extracted from both peer-reviewed and grey literature.

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

Summary

In 2023, the Ministry of Health, with the support of Health New Zealand, commissioned Allen + Clarke, working with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, to review the use of the alcohol levy and its function under the new Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022.

The levy is raised from alcohol produced or imported for sale in New Zealand and allows the Ministry to recover some of the cost of addressing the harm caused by alcohol. At the time of the review, the levy had not materially changed since 2009.  

The review has been conducted in two stages. The stage one report, published in July 2023, was timed to inform the annual alcohol levy setting for 2023/24. It recommended retaining the alcohol levy at the previous level until further analysis and more in-depth stakeholder engagement has been undertaken during stage two of the review. 

The stage two report, this report, was published in June 2024.

The second stage report makes several recommendations for updating how the levy is administered and invested. These include:

• increasing the Ministry of Health’s capacity to monitor and assess levy spending across the health entities.
• developing an investment framework to create criteria for levy investment and the ability to measure outcomes against strategic priorities.
• strategic governance structures to help set the priorities and direction of levy investments 
• undertaking a full assessment of current and potential levy-funded activities to ensure all activities meet the strategic direction and investment criteria.
• Increasing levy funding.

On 10 June, Cabinet confirmed an increase to the alcohol levy from about $11.5m a year to about $16.6m a year, effective from 1 July 2024. This reflects that the levy has not kept pace with inflation and has not been increased since 2009.  

The review’s recommendations will inform the Ministry of Health’s approach to administering and allocating the levy going forward, including setting criteria for investment.

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

Summary

The Public Health Agency, within the Ministry of Health, commissioned the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) to conduct an updated analysis of the costs of alcohol related harm in New Zealand. This was to support an independent review of the alcohol levy, undertaken by Allen + Clarke.

The NZIER report is the first estimate of the costs of alcohol harm to New Zealand since 2009.

The report is focused on informing future investment of the levy to help prevent alcohol harm, by estimating the total gross cost of alcohol harm and how these costs are distributed across society. Because of this focus it is not a cost-benefit analysis.

The report made the following estimates:

• $9.1b estimated total cost of alcohol harm based on disability-adjusted life years
• $4.8b associated with disability-adjusted life years from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)
• $1.2 b associated with disability-adjusted life years from alcohol use disorder
• $281m – intimate partner violence (for alcohol use disorder alone)
• $74m – child maltreatment (for hazardous drinking alone),
• $2.1b in societal cost of road crashes where alcohol was a factor
• $4b in lost productivity associated with alcohol use, including FASD, crimes and workplace absenteeism
• $810m, predominantly in health and ACC spending.

It is important to note the above estimates represent different ways of categorising alcohol harm and in some instances overlap. For example, costs associated with FASD may also show up in lost productivity and health spending. For this reason, the categories should not be compared directly to one another or to the total estimated harm from alcohol use ($9.1bn).

In addition, the NZIER report made some broad recommendations on the approach to investing the levy. These included:

• levy funding decisions should be focused on areas with evidence of impact, cost-effectiveness and scale of unmet need
• agencies should consider using a portion of levy funds to fill the evidence gaps identified by the NZIER report, and
• agencies should consider using a portion of levy funds to fund areas of harm with strong causal attribution to alcohol consumption.

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

The New Zealand Health Survey (NZHS) included a module on mental health and problematic substance use (including tobacco, alcohol and illicit substance use) in 2016/17, 2021/22 and 2022/23.  

This report presents information and key results from the mental health and problematic substance use module. It does so in two main sections: first, results for adults aged 15 years and over; and second, results for children aged 2–14 years.

Because of smaller achieved sample sizes in 2021/22 and 2022/23, data from these years have been pooled (combined) to produce more precise estimates. The combined data is referred to as 2021–23 data and has a slightly smaller sample size compared to 2016/17: 10,256 adults and 2,628 children in 2021–2023, compared with 12,929 adults and 3,733 children in 2016/17.

The module used screening tools to collect self-reported data about the severity of anxiety and depression symptoms and risk of problematic substance use in adults, as well as emotional and behavioural problems in children. The module also included questions about the use of mental health and addiction services and other types of support as well as unmet need for professional help with emotions, stress, mental health or substance use.

This report is accompanied by a data explorer, which is an interactive online tool, that includes a wider range of indicators, and presents disaggregated data by gender, age, ethnicity, disability status and neighbourhood deprivation. 

Access the Mental Health and Problematic Substance Use Data Explorer.

As mental health is a sensitive topic, and individuals may not be comfortable disclosing information about their use of illicit substances, respondents were able to self-complete the module on a tablet provided using computer-assisted-self-interviewing. The module for children was completed by the child’s primary parent or caregiver. 

The 2021–23 data from the NZHS mental health and problematic substance use module shows mental health outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings can then be used to inform a more nuanced approach to preventing and managing poor mental health and problematic substance use.

Key findings

• The prevalence of adults experiencing mild or greater anxiety and/or depression symptoms in the two weeks before the survey has increased from 25.0% in 2016/17 to 34.8% in 2021–23. Moderate or greater symptoms of anxiety and/or depression increased at a greater rate than mild symptoms over the period. 
• The prevalence of moderate or high risk of problematic substance use decreased between 2016/17 and 2021–23 (from 32.6% to 27.0%). The prevalence of moderate or high risk of problematic use of both tobacco and alcohol decreased over the same period (from 20.7% to 14.6% for tobacco and 15.8% to 13.0% for alcohol). However, the prevalence of moderate or high risk of problematic use of illicit substances increased over the same period (from 10.1% to 11.2%). 
• Increases in the prevalences of mild or greater anxiety and/or depression symptoms and moderate or high risk of problematic illicit substance use were greater for young adults aged 15-24 years. 
• Overall, women were more likely to experience depression and/or anxiety symptoms than men. Conversely, men were more likely to experience moderate or high risk of problematic substance use than women. 
• Some population groups, such as Māori and disabled adults, were more likely to experience anxiety and/or depression symptoms and to be at risk of problematic substance use than those not in the population group. 
• In 2021–23, 41.1% of adults used some type of service, such as primary health care, or support for concerns about their emotions, stress, mental health or substance use in the 12 months before the survey. This is an increase from 35.3% in 2016/17.  
• Unmet need for mental health and addiction services also increased over the same period. In 2021–23, 8.4% of adults felt that, in the 12 months before the survey, they needed professional help for their emotions, stress, mental health or substance use, but did not receive that help, up from 4.9% in 2016/17.
• The prevalence of children aged 2–14 years likely to have emotional symptoms increased from 9.2% in 2016/17 to 13.0% in 2021–23.
• Use of services and support for children remained relatively unchanged between 2016/17 and 2021–23. However, children’s unmet need for mental health and addiction services did increase over this period (from 4.8% to 6.8%).

For an overview of the methodology used in collecting, and preparing results from, the mental health and problematic substance use module, see the methodology page of the Mental Health and Problematic Substance Use Data Explorer at: Mental Health and Problematic Substance Use Data Explorer.

If you have any queries about this New Zealand Health Survey report on mental health and problematic substance use, please email: [email protected].

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

The New Zealand Health Survey (NZHS) included a module on mental health and problematic substance use (including tobacco, alcohol and illicit substance use) in 2016/17, 2021/22 and 2022/23.  

The Mental Health and Problematic Substance Use Data Explorer presents data from that module and covers topics such as mental health, risk of problematic substance use, informal help-seeking and access to mental health and addictions services for adults and children.  

It presents the latest results by gender, age, ethnic group, disability status, and neighbourhood deprivation, as well as changes over time. 

Published data can be downloaded from the Mental Health and Problematic Substance Use Data Explorer as a.csv file. 

Because of smaller achieved sample sizes in 2021/22 and 2022/23 due to COVID-19, data from these years have been pooled (combined) to produce more precise estimates. The combined data is referred to as 2021–23 data and has a slightly smaller sample size compared to 2016/17: 10,256 adults and 2,628 children in 2021–2023, compared with 12,929 adults and 3,733 children in 2016/17.

More information

Further details on the findings from the mental health and problematic substance use module are included in the Mental health and problematic substance use: New Zealand Health Survey 2016/17 and 2021-23 report. The findings can then be used to inform a more nuanced approach to preventing and managing poor mental health and problematic substance use.  

For an overview of the methodology used in collecting, and preparing results from, the mental health and problematic substance use module, see the methodology page of the Mental health and problematic substance use data explorer. 

If you have any queries about this New Zealand Health Survey data on mental health and problematic substance use, please email [email protected]. 

Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health

The Ministry of Health – Manatū Hauora has developed a snapshot report to monitor the progress the health system is making on delivery against the Interim Government Policy Statement on Health 2022–2024 (iGPS). The iGPS set the Government’s priorities and expectations for the health system for 2022–2024 as well as the framework for the interim New Zealand Health Plan | Te Pae Tata 2022 (interim NZ Health Plan).

The snapshot report contains national results for iGPS measures from the first year (2022/23) of the two-year interim period.

In addition to the results in the snapshot report, supplementary data for the measures by district, ethnicity and other breakdowns can be found on the Ministry of Health – Manatū Hauora GitHub page.

We have published an addendum to the iGPS. The addendum is an update of Appendix 3, which contains detailed definitions of the measures used for reporting on the iGPS. 

In response to the iGPS, Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora and Te Aka Whai Ora | Māori Health Authority developed the interim NZ Health Plan. The interim NZ Health Plan includes actions to deliver better outcomes in the priority iGPS areas. Reporting on progress and delivery of actions in the interim NZ Health Plan is on the Health New Zealand website in their official publications (eg, quarterly reports, annual report).