Pacific Health Reporting

Pacific peoples are often treated as a single group for the purpose of reporting on health outcomes in New Zealand, but this ignores the diversity between specific Pacific ethnic populations.

This report summarises work conducted using Statistics New Zealand’s (Stats NZ) Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to better capture this diversity and enable more accurate reporting on cancer outcomes (all cancers and stomach cancer) among those who identify with “Level 2” Pacific ethnicities: Samoan, Cook Islands Māori, Tongan, Niuean, Tokelauan & Fijian.

This work was supported as part of a Health Research Council (HRC) Programme Grant 17/610 led by Professor Parry Guilford at the University of Otago.

This research linked information in the New Zealand Cancer Registry (NZCR) to administrative records within the IDI to provide enhanced coverage of Pacific ethnicities, and new information about cancer cases not recorded in the NZCR outside the IDI. This included country of birth, years since arrival in New Zealand, and emigration from New Zealand following diagnosis. Within the IDI, relevant linked data from birth registrations, the mortality collection and border movements (arrivals and departures from New Zealand), 2013 and 2018 Census and Administrative Population Census data tables, were joined to the NZCR.

We report the impact of adding this information on ethnicity data availability and counts for Pacific peoples. Additionally, different potential population denominators for reporting on population cancer rates are compared.