How CivicNZ reads health official statistics

Group comparisons

Ethnicity, region, and deprivation cards always show the raw gap beside any official adjusted gap. Measured factors: Age structure (age-standardised rates); Neighbourhood deprivation (NZDep); Obesity prevalence; Daily smoking prevalence; Diabetes prevalence; Rurality (Geographic Classification for Health); GP enrolment; GP visits; Travel time to care. If an official table does not use a factor, the status is not published. An explained share is shown only when both figures exist — descriptive, not causal.

Open every comparison

Verdicts

CivicNZ trend rule. Labels: Better, Worse, Flat, Insufficient.

Direction-of-good is taken from the series catalogue. Official 95% significance wording and published confidence intervals come first. Otherwise a like-for-like recent change (same quarter or month a year earlier, or the previous annual point) is the headline, including Flat. Theil–Sen is longer-run context and does not override that headline; it is used only when no same-season pair exists and there are four or more official points spanning at least two years. Series that do not meet the minimum observations or period, or survey shares without published CIs, are Insufficient — never Flat-as-a-stand-in. CivicNZ does not apply a homemade 0.2-unit / 2% Flat band. Verdicts are never hand-set.

Series we could not source in this draft

• OECD/Eurostat avoidable (preventable + treatable) mortality for New Zealand

  Health at a Glance 2025 states no comparable treatable or preventable mortality is published for New Zealand. The OECD SDMX query returns no results. CivicNZ uses official NZ amenable mortality (Tatau Kahukura / Tupu Ola Moui), HIR all-cause age-standardised mortality, and ASH instead.

• NZ Health Survey ethnicity × NZDep cell-level cross-tabs

  The Annual Data Explorer can display them, but the Prevalence/mean download is a session file, not a stable URL, and the published CSV is one-way (ethnicity × gender, NZDep × gender). CivicNZ shows official one-way tables from the 2024/25 key results and parses a two-way row only when both ethnicity and NZDep appear on the same official CSV row. An explained share is not computed from one-way tables.

• Mean GP visits per person and travel time to care

  NZHS 2024/25 key results publish the share who visited a GP (76.2% of adults) and cost/time barriers. A national mean-visits time series and a travel-time series were not in those extracts.

• AIHW Australian wait-time comparators

  Definitions differ from NZ health targets. OECD life expectancy remains the international comparator used.

• Rurality-adjusted outcome residuals after ethnicity or NZDep

  HIR 2024 reports rural amenable mortality 20% higher than urban in 2018–2020. That is a one-way rurality ratio, not a residual of an ethnicity or NZDep gap.