How healthy are New Zealanders, really?
New Zealanders are least likely to consider themselves in poor health compared with people in other OECD countries, a report has found.
The Health At A Glance 2019: OECD Indicators report, published on Friday, found that when asked how they rate their own health, almost 9 per cent of adults on average across the economic forum of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development believe they are in poor health.
New Zealanders were an outlier – with 2.3 per cent of adults (over 15) rating their own health as bad or very bad.
However, an expert says that is ‘‘at odds’’ with New Zealand, where one-third of Kiwis are obese, a further third are overweight, and we have some of the highest cancer rates in the world.
After New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland and Australia all had fewer than 4 per cent of people rating their health as bad or very bad.
Those living in Korea had the highest self-ratings of poor health (17 per cent), followed by people in Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal, Estonia and Japan. Across the board, people with lower incomes, older people and women were more likely to rate their health as poor, the report stated.
Public health physician and Auckland University professor Dr Rhys Jones said the findings for self-rated health were ‘‘quite different’’ to measures such as mortality rates or life expectancy, where we ‘‘don’t fare nearly as well’’. Compared with other indicators in the report, such as childhood obesity, New Zealand was ‘‘way down the worse end’’.
When looking at issues such as heart disease and cancer, we tend to be ‘‘much closer to the middle of the pack, or well into the bottom half’’. Jones said the beauty of the self-rated health indicator was it was an incredibly simple question to ask but that was also a drawback – it was open to different interpretations.
Asking people to rate their health did not take into account a range of variables, he said.
For example, the data comes from the New Zealand Health Survey, which covers mostly Pa¯ keha¯ . As a result, it may not reflect the health issues affecting poorer populations – particularly Ma¯ ori and Pacific Islanders, who typically have worse health outcomes and worse self-rated health, he said.
The report cautioned crosscountry comparisons, saying good or poor health was subjective and could differ according to cultural perspectives.
Those living in Korea had the highest selfratings of poor health.