Respiratory disease put 97,000 people in hospital in 2025

There were more than 97,000 hospitalisations last year due to respiratory disease. New data from the Cardiac and Respiratory Foundation reveals admissions have surged in the three years to 2025 - from 80,230 in 2022 to 97,151 in 2025. Children aged under 14 and adults over 65 years old made up 70 percent of all hospital admissions The data also showed respiratory disease cost the New Zealand economy about $11.5 billion dollars annually, an increase of three billion on the three years prior.

Foundation chief executive Letitia Harding said there needed to be more than a blanket national response. "We need to be really looking at ways we can target more effectively, to impact obviously the health and well-being from a respiratory space, but also the impact from a financial burden on the hospital system as well and the healthcare system," she said.

The report found Pacific peoples were hospitalised at 2.4 times the rate of other ethnicities, and Māori at nearly twice that. Lung cancer was also responsible for 3477 hospitalisations in 2025 and 1912 deaths in 2022. Māori died from lung cancers at 2.75 times the rate of other New Zealanders, with Pacific peoples at a rate 1.52 times, it said.

Students were also facing the consequences of increased hospitalisations, with the return to school period greatly increasing the risk of respiratory hospitalisation for children. An estimated 466,000 school days were lost each year due to asthma - up from 360,000 in 2023, the report said.

Hospitalisation rates for childhood bronchiolitis increased by just over half between 2000 and 2025. The foundation wanted to see funding for the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine nirsevimab from April 2027 for all babies under one and all high-risk children under two to reduce hospitalisations and prevent severe illness.

"That makes no sense, and I've said this before, to not be funding the RSV vaccine for our wee kiddies," Harding said. "Not having that, it opens the door to so many other areas, things like our bronchiolitis."