A new report into the child health and wellbeing in New Zealand has revealed children living in lower socio-economic areas were disproportionately affected across five major health issues.
One of the key findings in the Cure Kids’ 2023 State of Child Health Report showed Pasifika children were 115 times more likely to be hospitalised with acute rheumatic fever, while Māori children were 46 times more likely compared to their European counterparts.
“Factors such as child poverty, limited access to healthcare, insufficient funding for childhood disease research and housing conditions all contribute to the disparity in health outcomes in New Zealand,” the report said.
The report also detailed that hospital admissions were “unacceptably high” for five priority areas including respiratory conditions, rheumatic fever and heart disease, skin infections, dental disease, and mental health.
These conditions were chosen because of their prevalence, the cost to the health system, the severity of disease for individual children, and the long-term consequences for children’s future health.
“We believe that these are the most urgent priorities for child health. Not only have rates of hospital admissions remained unacceptably high over two decades, but the burden of disease is inequitable,” the report said.
Cure Kids chief executive Frances Soutter told Breakfast the results were “really severe” and hospitalisations for “completely preventable reasons” had escalated dramatically over the last two decades.
This included a 44% increase in hospitalisation of respiratory conditions for children under one years old in the past two decades.
“So we need to take a community-based approach and working together with a collaborative effect with government, with health providers, with local communities to reverse these stats.”
Soutter said “community-based solutions” were needed in order to fight inequity and barriers to healthcare.
“Leveraging things like pharmacies, public health nurses, schools, so that we are effectively taking the care to the community and allowing the community to drive it with their own cultural needs.”
The report found that a fifth of young people reported serious psychological distress, a proportion that had increased “more than 300% over the past 12 years”.
“Our young people are in a state of distress. We’ve been through a really big crisis with the pandemic, lack of access to school support. All of those things just add up,” she said.
“Poor housing, poor nutrition, all these things have a cumulative effect on our tamariki and rangitahi.”
Soutter said the report was valuable because it gave the Government an “evidence-based directional approach to where the greatest unmet need is”.
“It’s worth the Government working and collaborating together with organisations like Cure Kids who tap into this incredible resource of researchers who are experts in their area.
“Let’s take an evidence-based approach to how we solve some of these big complex problems.”
Vaccination was one of the key recommendations to improve child health outcomes, including continued subsidisation of the influenza vaccine annually.
“The data have shown that increasing access to this vaccine by subsidising it is highly cost-effective as it reduces the risk of influenza-associated hospitalisation in children and, by association, in their elderly relatives,” it said.