Cardiac Impact Report

The Foundation's 2025 Heart disease in Aotearoa: morbidity, mortality, and service delivery report exposed deep flaws in New Zealand’s heart healthcare system, revealing that access to life-saving treatment often depends on luck, postcode, and ethnicity rather than clinical need. This was a first-of-its-kind report produced in New Zealand.

• Life-threatening delays: Half of all heart attack patients aren't seen within internationally accepted timeframes.
• Alarming workforce shortage: New Zealand has only a third of the cardiologists it should have.
• Systemic inequality: Māori and Pacific people are hospitalised or die from heart disease more than a decade earlier, on average, than other New Zealanders.
• The financial burden: Heart disease costs the country's health system and economy $13.8 billion per year
• A postcode lottery for care: Regions with the highest death rates -Tairāwhiti, Lakes, Whanganui, and Taranaki - have the fewest cardiac specialists.
• The deadliest conditions: Heart disease accounts for 20% of all deaths in New Zealand. The five heart conditions responsible for the majority are: heart failure, atrial fibrillation and flutter (AFF), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), subsequent myocardial infarction and cardiomyopathy.