Our data

Māori and Pacific Peoples doctors

The Number of Māori and Pacific Peoples doctors visual is based on registration data. All other visuals use workforce survey data. Please see the explanation section at the bottom of the page for more detail.

Explanation of terms used in this dashboard

Workforce survey data

We ask doctors for workforce data as part of their application to renew their practising certificate. This section of the application collects detailed information from doctors about the work they are doing. This fills in the gaps not covered by register data and non-register registration data enriching these datasets.

Ethnicity data

We collect ethnicity data from doctors as part of the workforce survey, completed by doctors at the time of renewing their annual practising certificate. Doctors can choose not to report their ethnicity. Ethnicity data has been linked with registration data to enable reporting on the demographic breakdown of registered medical doctors.

Doctors can report up to six ethnicities. However, when we report data, we assign each doctor a single ethnicity using Statistics New Zealand’s prioritisation standard. This is aggregated up to level 1 the classification standard to preserve privacy. The ethnicity we use in analysis is the one reported by the doctor with the highest priority.

The priority order at level 1 of Statistics New Zealand's classifications is:  

  1. Māori 
  2. Pacific Peoples 
  3. Asian
  4. Middle Eastern/Latin American/African
  5. Other Ethnicity
  6. European
  7. Residual Categories.

We updated our data collection to fully align with Statistics New Zealand standard from 1 July 2024. As a result, some pages on the dashboard may vary slightly as they use data collected before this date. These pages will be updated in the next update - 30 June 2025. For example, some pages may refer to the category of "Pacific Peoples" as "Pasifika".

Gender data

The Council supports the right of people to identify with non-binary genders and have this reflected in their official record. Doctors can update their recorded gender identity at any time through the myMCNZ portal.

There are a small number of doctors on the register with a current practising certificate who identify as gender diverse - 14 as of 31 March 2025. We have not presented these doctors as a separate group when data has been broken down by gender because of the small size of the group, and the need to preserve privacy.  

Gender is a complex area. Not all doctors who identify as a different gender from what they were assigned at birth will have chosen to identify as Gender Diverse.  Some will have chosen to record the gender with which they do identify (Male or Female).

Representativeness of survey data

Our workforce survey has a very high response rate - 98.3 percent in 2023-2024. We believe the response is representative and that valid conclusions can be drawn from the data. We make this assertion based on the population size and demographic comparison of the survey data with register data.

The size of the population for our survey is the number of doctors with a current practising certificate - 20,012 as of 31 June 2024. For a population of this size a response rate of 98.3 percent should provide 99 percent certainty. Demographic comparison of the survey data to medical register data shows only very small differences.

See our workforce survey reports for more detail:
https://www.mcnz.org.nz/about-us/what-we-do/workforce-survey/