Regional Results 2017–2020: New Zealand Health Survey

The Regional Data Explorer presents the 2017–2020 regional results from the New Zealand Health Survey, for both adults and children, for all District Health Board (DHB), Public Health Unit (PHU) and Regional Council levels. It includes more than 150 indicators on health behaviours, health status and access to health care.

This regional release combines three years of data from July 2017 to June 2020. This is the third regional release from the New Zealand Health Survey, with results available from 2014–2017 and 2011–2014 for comparison.

Regional Data Explorer 2017–2020: New Zealand Health Survey

Combining three years of data increases the sample size, enabling results to be provided for all regions and, in some cases, for sub-populations (ie, age, ethnicity and neighbourhood deprivation) within those regions. However, even with pooled data the results for smaller regions and sub-populations often have wide margins of error.

The survey data is presented in tables, maps and graphs. Published data can be downloaded from the Regional Data Explorer as a .csv file.

Data collection for the 2019/20 New Zealand Health Survey stopped before New Zealand entered Alert Level 4 on 25 March 2020, so there is no data in this Regional Data Explorer about the health of New Zealanders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The New Zealand Health Survey uses the calibrated weighting method to create survey weights that rate up the responding sample to represent the target population. Statistics NZ have recently revised their population estimates, which are used to calculate weights for the New Zealand Health Survey. As a result, the revised population estimates have been used to recalculate results from the New Zealand Health Survey between 2011/12 and 2019/20. This means that some results in the 2017–2020 Regional Data Explorer will be different to those that have been previously published. The impact on prevalences is negligible, but the estimated numbers of people are slightly larger, particularly for Māori.

The Ministry of Health has also taken this opportunity to implement an improved calculation method, and a small amount of the change in the results can be attributed to improvements in the method.

Further information is available in:

• Recalculation of New Zealand Health Survey results (PDF, 220 KB)
• Recalculation of New Zealand Health Survey results (Word, 189 KB)

If you have any queries please email [email protected].