The New Zealand Public Health Observatory (NZPHO) has been developed by the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR), as an initiative to improve access to public health surveillance data collected and reported by ESR as part of Ministry of Health contracts for services.

Internet and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies are used to make public health surveillance data widely available. The website has been designed to make the data easy to extract and use for different analyses required by public health services, district health boards, public health researchers, industry groups and other interested parties.

The data presented here is also published in surveillance reports by ESR on the Public Health Surveillance website surv.esr.cri.nz and further information about the datasets can be found on that site.

The target audience is principally professional staff in the health sector, although the information presented on this site may be of use in other sectors, and feedback is welcomed from all users.

Details about the source of the data are provided with each dataset. In addition the following organisations have provided national context data

• Statistics New Zealand provided the demographic data and census geographic data
• Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) provided the topographic datasets used in the maps.