There were more than 97,000 hospitalisations last year due to respiratory disease.<\/p>\n
New data from the Cardiac and Respiratory Foundation reveals admissions have surged in the three years to 2025 – from 80,230 in 2022 to 97,151 in 2025.<\/p>\n
Children aged under 14 and adults over 65 years old made up 70 percent of all hospital admissions<\/p>\n
The data also showed respiratory disease cost the New Zealand economy about $11.5 billion dollars annually, an increase of three billion on the three years prior.<\/p>\n
Foundation chief executive Letitia Harding said there needed to be more than a blanket national response.<\/p>\n
“We need to be really looking at ways we can target more effectively, to impact obviously the health and well-being from a respiratory space, but also the impact from a financial burden on the hospital system as well and the healthcare system,” she said.<\/p>\n
The report found Pacific peoples were hospitalised at 2.4 times the rate of other ethnicities, and M\u0101ori at nearly twice that.<\/p>\n
Lung cancer was also responsible for 3477 hospitalisations in 2025 and 1912 deaths in 2022.<\/p>\n
M\u0101ori died from lung cancers at 2.75 times the rate of other New Zealanders, with Pacific peoples at a rate 1.52 times, it said.<\/p>\n
Students were also facing the consequences of increased hospitalisations, with the return to school period greatly increasing the risk of respiratory hospitalisation for children.<\/p>\n
An estimated 466,000 school days were lost each year due to asthma – up from 360,000 in 2023, the report said.<\/p>\n
Hospitalisation rates for childhood bronchiolitis increased by just over half between 2000 and 2025.<\/p>\n
The foundation wanted to see funding for the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine nirsevimab from April 2027 for all babies under one and all high-risk children under two to reduce hospitalisations and prevent severe illness.<\/p>\n
“That makes no sense, and I’ve said this before, to not be funding the RSV vaccine for our wee kiddies,” Harding said.<\/p>\n
“Not having that, it opens the door to so many other areas, things like our bronchiolitis.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were more than 97,000 hospitalisations last year due to respiratory disease. New data from the Cardiac and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-643439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}