Budget 2023: Government Health Research Investment Underwhelming – again

media release

22^nd May 2023

“New Zealanders have once again been let down by Budget 2023’s underwhelming support for health research” New Zealanders for Health Research (NZHR) Chief Executive Chris Higgins said today.

“Health research and innovation is the single most important way in which we improve our health and healthcare – by identifying and implementing the best means to prevent, diagnose and treat conditions. Yet budgeted government investment in health research specifically has fallen by $7.7m from 0.8% of budgeted government health care costs in 2022 to 0.74% in 2023”.  

“This is in contrast to both very good evidence that the government should be investing at least 2.4% of its health services costs into health research, and NZHR’s call for an additional investment of $27m in 2023 for mental health and cancer research” said Mr Higgins

“It’s particularly concerning that Health Research Council (HRC) funding has remained unchanged for yet another year, Ministry of Health funding for health science research, evidence, data and insights has been reduced from last year’s $23.4m to $15.5m, and investment in the health related national science challenges has fallen by $3.8m.”

“Although the $10m per year allocated for the RNA development platform and capital investment in the “Science City” initiative (for co-location of research capability, with focuses which include health and wellbeing) are both very welcome developments” said Mr Higgins “we must invest a lot more to discover effective treatments and cures for the 7000 per year New Zealanders who are dying early from non-preventable causes”.

“We had hoped that in an election year the government would have heeded the results of NZHR’s 2022 Kantar opinion poll where 75% of respondents agreed that government should invest more funding in health research, 66% said that the 2022/23 budgeted allocation for health research was already too low, only 9% said that an allocation of less  than 1% of health care costs was an appropriate level of health research investment, 39% said it should be more than 2%, and 35% said they’d be more likely to vote for a party which promised to increase the government health research budget ” said Mr Higgins

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For further information and requests for interviews contact NZHR chief executive Chris Higgins on 027 292 8433 or [email protected] .

New Zealanders for Health Research (NZHR) is New Zealand’s peak body representing the entire health and medical research pipeline. We are committed to bringing about best possible health for all New Zealanders through increase investment in health research as an essential and embedded component of all parts of New Zealand’s health system. We are an alliance supported by universities, clinical research organisations, and organisations representing both the philanthropic and commercial sectors. For more information visit https://www.nz4healthresearch.org.nz/