My dissertation support dog. Beau deserves a degree too.

This is the supposed record investment in health.

Beyond shifting health resources, we could also improve overall population health by better regulating the availability, affordability, and advertising of low-nutrition foods and harmful products to promote healthier lives. 🔚

Investment in effective preventative and primary care can play a significant role in addressing health funding challenges by reducing the flow of patients requiring expensive hospital care.

These numbers reinforce the idea that increasing barriers to accessing preventative and primary care are contributing to the growing demands on hospital services. At a population level, people are sicker at the first diagnosis of illness and require more intensive treatment.

🦷 64.8% of children and 66.4% of adults brush their teeth with standard fluoride toothpaste at least twice each day. Nearly half of adults (44.9%) reported unmet need for dental care due to cost.

🏥 One in five (21.3%) children visited an ED in 2023/24, up from 15.1% in 2018/19. Visits to ED also increased for adults over the last five years. 17.8% of adults visited ED at least once in the previous 12 months in 2023/24, compared to 15.0% in 2018/19.

💨 About 480,000 adults (11.1%) were daily vapers in 2023/24, up from 3.3% in 2018/19. The highest daily vaping rates were in Māori (28.8%), Pacific peoples (21.5%), and young people aged 18–24 years (26.5%).

🥗 One in three adults (33.8%), nearly 1.5 million were classified as obese in 2023/24, up from 1.25 million (31.3%) in 2018/19. Nearly half of adults living in the most deprived neighbourhoods were classified as obese, compared to a quarter of adults living in the least deprived neighbourhoods.

💊 An estimated 191,000 adults (4.4%) had an unfilled prescription due to cost. Māori adults were 1.9 times more likely than non-Māori, and Pacific adults 2.2 times more likely than non-Pacific adults, to forgo collecting a prescription for the same reason.

🩺 One in four adults (25.7%) and one in five children (18.5%) reported that ‘time to get an appointment was too long’. One in six adults (15.5%) didn’t visit a GP due to cost in the 12 months before the 2023/24 survey, with cost being a bigger barrier for women (19.0%) than men (11.9%).

🍻 Hazardous drinking is most common among those aged 18-24 years (22.6%). However the same age group has seen the largest decline in hazardous drinking of any age group in the last five years (from 35.9% to 22.6%).

🚭 About 300,000 adults (6.9%) were daily smokers, which is a similar rate to the previous year (6.8%) but a decrease from 12.9% in 2018/19. This has been the first time an increase in smoking rates has been recorded since the survey began 12 years ago.