15 August 2022
Jai Ganesh
[FYI request #19910 email]
Tēnā koe Jai,
Your Official Information Act request, reference H202205884:
Thank you for your email on 14 July 2022 requesting information relating to the data and reporting of
mortality and hospitalisations in the last three years.
As part of the transformation of the health and disability system reforms, as of 1 July 2022 the functions
previously under the Ministry of Health's Data and Digital directorate has now transferred to Te Whatu Ora
Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora). As the matters you have raised now fal under the functions of Te
Whatu Ora, our agency wil respond to your request which has been considered under the Official
Information Act 1982 (the Act). You requested the fol owing:
“We're now in 2022, I was wondering why we don't have a data breakdown of mortality and
hospitalisations by causes broken down for 2020, 2021 and now most of 2022. Surely it's being
col ected and surely there's a system where it's being col ated, especially given technology has come
a long way and we have a more centralised system now since pre 2019 when the reports were
regular. Why isn't it available? When is it expected? Whose responsibility is it?”
Mortality
After the close of a calendar year, there is a 12-18 month process to assign cause of death codes to the
majority of deaths in that year. Te Whatu Ora’s clinical coding team reviews the death certificate and
health history of the deceased, to assign cause of death codes. Approximately 10% of deaths are referred
to the Coroner each year to determine cause. Deaths which require a coronial inquiry can take between
two to three or more years for cause of death to be assigned. We do not make mortality data available
publicly until the majority of deaths have been assigned a cause of death, so that the data we release is
complete and accurate. The Chief Coroner has noted delays in the time it is taking them to assign cause of
death codes, and there is information about this in the following article:
www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/125883560/no-end-in-sight-for-ballooning-coroners-waits.
Te Whatu Ora publishes preliminary mortality statistics, which do not include injury-related deaths
information, which are typically more influenced by coronial cases, in December each year. The 2020
preliminary data will be published in December 2022.
Te Whatu Ora has a Mortality web tool that is publicly available and provides the most recent 2019 data as
well as historical mortality data dating back to 1948. This information is available in the fol owing link.
Please refer to the right hand corner of the page to open the webtool:
www.health.govt.nz/publication/mortality-web-tool
For all our other published mortality data and stats please refer to the fol owing link:
www.health.govt.nz/nz-health-statistics/health-statistics-and-data-sets/mortality-data-and-stats.
TeWhatuOra.govt.nz
83 Molesworth Street, PO Box 5013
Welington New Zealand 6140
For more recent data, there is approximately a six-to-eight-week lag between a death occurring and the
fact of this death being available from Te Whatu Ora data. The earliest fact of death information is available
online from the Statistics New Zealand COVID-19 data portal available at:
www.stats.govt.nz/experimental/covid-19-data-portal. They also publish mortality statistics at:
www.stats.govt.nz/tools/stats-infoshare Select Populations, and then Deaths.
Hospitalisations
Te Whatu Ora publishes tables of public and private hospitalisations annual y. We are in the process of
turning this data into an interactive web tool, which we aim to publish in October 2022.
The data series of publicly-funded hospitalisations is available at
: www.health.govt.nz/nz-health-
statistics/health-statistics-and-data-sets/publicly-funded-hospital-discharges-series/publicly-funded-
hospital-discharges-series/publicly-funded-hospital-discharges-series.
The data series of privately-funded hospitalisations is available at
: www.health.govt.nz/nz-health-
statistics/health-statistics-and-data-sets/privately-funded-hospital-discharges-series.
For more recent data, Te Whatu Ora receives coded discharge summaries for publicly funded
hospitalisations within 21 days after the month of discharge. Fol owing the receipt of this reporting, data
quality and completeness checks are undertaken. This data can be released on request within three-to-six
months of the date of discharge, depending on the purpose(s) for which it wil be used. However, some
publicly funded hospital care happens in private facilities and are reported by the private facility which
provided the care. For these cases there can be a longer delay in Te Whatu Ora receiving the hospital
discharge summaries, and these then need to be coded by the clinical coding team. In addition, longer term
hospitalisations, for instance long stay geriatric hospitalisations, take some time to be included in our data
as we do not receive the hospital report until the person dies or is discharged.
For these reasons, we do not consider publicly funded hospitalisations data to be complete until 18 months
after the end of the year of discharge. We do not publish hospitalisations data publicly on the internet until
we have received the majority of hospital reports, and done data quality checks, so that the data we
release is complete and accurate.
Provisional public hospitalisations data is available on request from:
[email address].
Private hospital providers are not legally required to report privately funded hospitalisation events to Te
Whatu Ora. Most private providers do report, but there are often longer lag times between the month of
discharge and Te Whatu Ora receiving the record than for public providers. There is a longer lag time for
this data to be considered provisional, as the diagnoses and procedure data is assigned clinical codes by the
Te Whatu Ora clinical coding team. After the close of a calendar year, there is a 12-18 month process to
assign clinical codes to the majority of private hospital events in that year. Note that some publicly funded
care provided by private hospitals also needs to be coded in Te Whatu Ora. Privately funded hospital
discharge data is not released until al events have been reported to us, and the data has undergone data
quality checking and coding. This data is therefore considered provisional within two years of the year of
discharge.
Te Whatu Ora publishes hospitalisation statistics annual y, in October each year. The 2019/20 data wil be
published in October 2022. More recent publicly funded hospitalisation data is available on request from
[email address].
I trust the information provided is of assistance. You are advised of your right to also raise any
concerns with the Office of the Ombudsman. Information about how to do this is available at:
www.ombudsman.parliament.nz or by phoning 0800 802 602.
As this information may be of interest to other members of the public, Te Whatu Ora may decide to
proactively release a copy of this response on Te Whatu Ora’s website. Al requester data, including your
name and contact details, wil be removed prior to release.
Nāku iti noa, nā
Gaynor Bradfield
Manager, Office of the Chief Data and Digital
