Te Ao Mārama: Māori Health, Wellbeing & Social Survey Panel

There is an expressed need of Māori providers and communities for high quality, localised information that can be used to inform and monitor interventions to improve key Maori health outcome measures. Te Hao Nui is a longitudinal study that will link together the data from Te Kupenga, the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), and the Longitudinal Census Database to create the world’s largest and most comprehensive indigenous longitudinal study capable of following individual pathways forwards and backward in time.

Funded by: Health Research Council
Grant number: 18/849

The study entirely draws on previously collected administrative data, no new data are collected as part of this project.

Focusing on informing local interventions and policy, this project will transform national statistics into locally accessible information linked into service delivery planning and evaluation at the iwi, rohe as well as at the regional level.

Linking into existing iwi and regional Māori development plans, this project will produce information that will immediately inform the delivery of services and interventions to improve rangatahi wellbeing.

It will additionally create a permanent resource within the official statistics system that can be used for research, evaluation, and monitoring of rangatahi well-being on an on‐going basis.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated health inequities between Māori and other New Zealanders. These inequities were predicted by early disease outcome modelling, demonstrated after the second outbreak, and inspired a robust equity-driven vaccination prioritisation strategy the Government was slow to adopt. Central Government’s failure to pro-actively focus on preventing inequity has been the subject of two High Court cases and an urgent Treaty of Waitangi hearing: the predicted inequity occurred and is now routinely reported at a national level in Crown health data.

Alongside the National Hauora Coalition, iNZight Analytics has produced a number of reports on the use of Crown data to improve COVID-19 outcomes for Māori.

Initial report commissioned by: National Hauora Coalition
Additional resourcing from: iNZight Analytics

The initial report from focused on using Crown data to highlight potential focuses of Crown action to improve COVID-19 outcomes for Māori. We put a Te Tiriti lens on the available data to also provide information on how policy amenable factors relate to COVID-19 outcomes, with the aim of identifying potential policy targets that could reduce future health inequities faced by Māori. The report begins with a demonstration of the inequity between Māori/non-Māori and the association of these inequities with area-based social deprivation as measured by the NZ Deprivation Index. However, the intent of was report is to highlight government policy targets, so we then examine whether household and individual factors are associated with good or poor outcomes for Māori specifically.

This report used data in the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to quantify and examine inequities with respect to four COVID-19 outcomes: testing positive, hospitalisations, deaths, and vaccination status. This involve dall the available data in the IDI for the entire duration of the pandemic in Aotearoa (as at October 2023) that can be linked at an individual level. This was the first time such a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 inequity for Māori has been done in Aotearoa. This report is not available to the public.

A technical report of the methods used for this work was later published by iNZight Analytics: More than just living in a deprived area: an equity-focused analysis of policy amenable factors associated with Māori COVID-19 outcomes. This is available for download in the links section.

Despite evidence that Māori experience disproportionate rates of disability, there is a lack of accurate, culturally-grounded data on the prevalence and impacts of disability on Māori. This limits understanding of how disability affects Māori health, wellbeing, social inclusion, and economic outcomes, and constrains efforts to address these inequities in policy and disability services.

Funded by: Health Research Council of New Zealand
Hosted by: University of Otago

Led by Bernadette Jones, this project used a Māori-led methodological approach to develop culturally appropriate measures of disability, quantify its prevalence, and examine its impacts on health, wellbeing, social participation, and economic outcomes. It involved a large-scale quantitative survey designed to better understand lived experiences of disability by Māori. The survey explored cultural identity alongside everyday experiences of disability, including the language people use to describe themselves and their limitations.