The relationship between income poverty and child hospitalisations in New Zealand: Evidence from longitudinal household panel data and Census data

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Very little high quality evidence exists on the causal relationship between income poverty and childhood health. We provide a comprehensive overview of the association between household income poverty and hospitalisations for children. METHODS: We used New Zealand's Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to link income poverty data from the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE; n = 21,759 households) and the 2013 New Zealand Census (n = 523,302 households) to publicly funded hospital records of children aged 0-17 (SoFIE: n = 39,459; Census, n = 986,901). Poverty was defined as equivalised household income below 60% of the median income, calculated both before and after ho..