Eye Health Statistics: New Zealand and the North Shore

Reading these figures

• The Waitematā district (North Shore, West Auckland and Rodney) had 105.8 people per 1,000 enrolled dispensed a funded eye medicine in 2025, above the national 93.6.
• Funded tear-deficiency drops grew faster (40.6% more people since 2021) than eye medicines overall (22.9%).
• Health NZ cautions that the group a medicine belongs to does not necessarily show the condition it was used for, so these counts are not counts of eye disease.
• For diabetes eye screening and eye checks with age, see the diabetes study and the over-65s study.

How we did it

This page collects figures from our three studies, each built by a script from the raw public data and checked by a second script against a different table or file: the diabetes study (Health NZ Virtual Diabetes Register, June 2026 release), the over-65s study (Stats NZ 2013, 2018 and 2023 Censuses) and the dry eye drops study (Health NZ Pharmaceutical Data web tool, extract of 9 July 2026).

The eye-medicine figures come from the same Pharmaceutical Data web tool extract: people dispensed each level-3 group of the Pharmaceutical Schedule's "Eye Preparations" at least once in the year, by district of residence (measure "Dispensings"), and the level-2 total for any eye medicine. Rates per 1,000 divide by the number of people enrolled with a general practice at the end of 2025, as published in the Virtual Diabetes Register tool.

A separate check script downloads the pharmaceutical data again, confirms these figures against the product-level file, re-reads the census table, and compares every figure taken from a study with that study's own live check.

Sources

• Health New Zealand: Virtual Diabetes Register web tool: version published 25 June 2026
• Health New Zealand: Pharmaceutical Data web tool: extract of 9 July 2026, 2021 to 2025
• Stats NZ: 2023 Census population change by age group and local board: 2013, 2018 and 2023 Censuses
• Stats NZ: Aotearoa Data Explorer: the same census tables

Limits

• Funded community dispensings count prescriptions filled at a pharmacy and paid for by the government. Over-the-counter purchases and hospital use are missing.
• One person can appear in several eye-medicine groups; we never add people across groups. The "any eye medicine" figure is Health NZ's own count of unique people.
• The Virtual Diabetes Register is an estimate from health records and does not show who has had an eye screen.
• Census counts are randomly rounded by Stats NZ, and the Upper Harbour local board area is one part of the North Shore.
• District figures cover the whole Waitematā district (North Shore, West Auckland and Rodney); none of these sources publishes suburb-level eye data.

Cite this page

NVISION Eyecare (2026). Eye Health Statistics: New Zealand and the North Shore. Published 13 November 2026. nvision.nz/research/eye-health-statistics-nz

The data behind this page is in eye-health-statistics-nz.csv, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit. This is general information drawn from public data, not medical advice about your own eyes.