New Zealand's health system is adept at dealing with individual issues but has made less progress in tackling long-standing or complex problems, a new report says.
While the health system was generally excellent, continuing inequity in access, treatment and outcomes was unacceptable, A Window on the Quality of New Zealand's Health Care 2018 - a report by the Health Quality and Safety Commission - said.
"We cannot continue with our current approaches and ignore our lack of progress in these important areas."
The report - the fourth such audit of the health system by the HQSC - also highlighted issues with health funding and workforce morale as being areas of concern.
"We are now seeing issues that do not lend themselves to the sort of targeted methods and single-organisation approaches widely used in recent years," the report said.
"New approaches are needed."
Care statistics were similar to those of other developed countries, and New Zealand's were improving at a similar, if not faster, rate, the report said.
However, Maori, Pacific Islanders and the poor suffered worse health and had less access to medical care.
"Every previous Window has noted that New Zealand's health care system struggles to provide high-quality services to all New Zealanders, and that outcomes for some groups of people are not as good as for others," the report noted.
"The effects of deprivation are clear, but the solutions will require measures beyond those that involve direct investment in health services."
Issues with funding were a possible contributing factor to this: the report noted an increasing gap between expenditure on the New Zealand health care system and those systems of similar countries.
"New Zealand has had lower expenditure on its health care system than most comparable countries for many years, both as total expenditure per person and as a percentage of gross domestic product," the report said.
"New Zealand consistently has not only lower per-head expenditure, but also a smaller share of national income spent on health care than similar countries ... for example, matching the Australian share of national income spent on health would add $996million to New Zealand's health expenditure."
