The annual results of New Zealand\u2019s Health Survey show changes in youth vaping and smoking, barriers to going to the GP and dentist, and how many people experience psychological distress.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The annual New Zealand Health Survey interviews 9,000 adults and 3,000 children, a representative sample of the country as a whole. Each year, participants are asked about all aspects of their health \u2013 what they eat, exposure to secondhand smoke, whether they can access different kinds of healthcare and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The survey has been conducted annually since 2011\/12 (it\u2019s run from July to June \u2013 dates on these charts are for the year ended in July 2012, July 2013 etc.). It provides a comprehensive picture of New Zealanders\u2019 health and how it\u2019s changing.<\/p>\n
Here are some key findings from this year\u2019s results, charted.<\/p>\n
While GP visits are partially subsidised by the government, people aged 14 and older have to pay a charge on top. Very Low Cost Access (VLCA) GPs charge $19.50 for adults, and Community Services Card holders and frequent visitors to the doctor pay less too. For everyone else, GP visits for enrolled patients are usually somewhere between $60 and $90, and casual visits to a doctor where you\u2019re not enrolled can cost over $100. The Labour Party recently announced a policy <\/a>of three free visits to the GP for everyone every year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The health survey shows that for 15% of people, or about one out of seven, the cost of going to the GP has been a major barrier to getting healthcare in the last year. However, wait times are an even bigger factor. For 25% of people, or one in four, long wait times for an appointment at the GP have prevented them from going. The current government has considered making reducing wait times at the GP<\/a> a health target; research from earlier this year showed that a third of people had to wait more than two weeks <\/a>to see a doctor. Finance minister Nicola Willis criticised Labour\u2019s free GP visit policy, saying it would add to the wait time problem. Other significant barriers cited in the survey are getting time off work or not being able to find appropriate transport.<\/p>\n Interestingly, the cost of prescriptions is not as much of a barrier, with just 3.6% of people not accessing prescriptions in the 2025 data due to cost, according to the survey. The previous Labour government\u2019s policy of removing the $5 surcharge for prescriptions for funded medications was in place from July 2023 to July 2024,\u00a0 and does not seem to have made much of an impact on the data. However, it\u2019s possible that the slight dip in people not accessing prescriptions shown in the survey data from this year is because participants are asked to recall the previous year \u2013 so someone interviewed in 2024 may have been remembering the past year when prescriptions were totally free.\u00a0<\/p>\n While rates of people not getting prescriptions due to cost have hovered between 3% and 4% for the last five years, it\u2019s likely the people who have the least ability to pay continue not accessing medications. Previous research has shown that people who had to pay for prescriptions were being hospitalised more often and for longer than people who didn\u2019t: every $1 collected by the government in prescription fees cost $18<\/a> in people going to the hospital, and people with multiple prescriptions <\/a>for different conditions were paying the most, according to the University of Otago research carried out in 2020.<\/p>\n Casey Costello, the associate minister of health, welcomed the data about reduced smoking rates, describing it as a \u201ccontinuation of the great progress that\u2019s been made in the last few years. The rate has decreased since 2024 \u2013 but only by 0.1%, from 6.9% of the population smoking daily to 6.8% of the population smoking daily, which is the same statistic as in 2023.<\/p>\n There\u2019s been a small increase in the number of 18-24 year olds smoking every day in the past couple of years, too: 3.9% of people in this age bracket smoked every day in 2023, and 4.4% of them smoked every day in 2025. Clearly, there\u2019s some real-world reflection of the numerous trend pieces about young people \u201cromanticising cigarettes again<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n While smoking rates have fallen overall, vaping has risen in popularity. Vaping data has only been gathered annually since 2018, but the overall average of adults vaping daily increased from 11.1 to 11.7% in the last year. Youth vaping data shows a rapid increase between 2020 and 2022, but the rates have been slowly falling ever since. Research has shown<\/a> that the popularity of vaping may be hindering progress in reducing smoking rates among young people.\u00a0<\/p>\n The current government appointed Matt Doocey as the first minister for mental health in 2023. Since then, it has provided $24m of funding to youth mental health organisation Gumboot Friday \u2013 a move that has had its share of controversies<\/a>. Doocey said this week<\/a> that Health New Zealand\u2019s frontline mental health workforce has grown by 10% in the last year with increased funding for psychology internships and psychiatry registrars.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rates of self-reported \u201chigh or very high\u201d psychological distress in the health survey in the 15-24 age bracket have slightly decreased, from 23.7% in 2022 to 22.9% in 2025. This age bracket continues to have the highest rates of distress, however. Since 2012, psychological distress has risen in all age brackets, with 14.6% of people reporting \u201chigh or very high\u201d distress in the 2024-25 survey. It\u2019s difficult to exactly pin down the causes of psychological distress \u2013 but in a piece for The Spinoff from this week, Harriet Wild reflected<\/a> on the interconnectedness of job losses, under-resourced frontline services and poor mental health.\u00a0<\/p>\n In New Zealand, dental care is subsidised until age 18. After that, care is fully privatised, unlike the rest of the medical system. This shows in data from the health survey: nearly half of all adults do not access dental care even when they have need of it, due to the cost.<\/p>\n The under-18 system isn\u2019t perfect, either<\/a>. In some areas, there aren\u2019t enough dentists signed up to the under-18 contract with the government, and there aren\u2019t enough oral health therapists (who often work with kids under 12) to visit all the schools. Dentist Tule Misa, president of the Pasifika Dental Association, told The Spinoff<\/a> that the level of unmet need is high in her community \u2013 to the point where people sometimes knock on her door at night, asking for help, but all she can do is give them prescriptions for the pain.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2025, 46.8% of people met the recommended fruit intake of two servings per day, and 6.8% of people met the recommended vegetable intake of five to six servings per day for men and five for women.\u00a0<\/p>\n While many more people eat enough fruit, very few people eat enough vegetables, and the proportion of people getting adequate amounts of both has been decreasing. The data from the health survey is quantitative \u2013 but it\u2019s not hard to compare the drop in eating vegetables with the increase in the price of fruit and vegetables. The cost of fruit has increased 5% in the last six months, and the cost of vegetables has increased 0.8% \u2013 meanwhile, food as a whole has increased 1.2%. According to Statistics New Zealand,<\/a> more expensive tomatoes, broccoli and capsicum are the cause of the increase in vegetable prices. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The annual results of New Zealand\u2019s Health Survey show changes in youth vaping and smoking, barriers to going…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[492,3187,97602,134,554,111,43,139,69,20789,2935,1059],"class_list":["post-144988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-comments-enabled","tag-dental-care","tag-gp-visits","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-smoking","tag-society","tag-vaping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}