Telehealth Mental Health Demand in New Zealand Outpaces Intake

Referrals to New Zealand’s specialist mental health and addiction services rose 10% in 2024/25, reversing several years of decline, and about 456,000 adults say they wanted professional help for their mental health or substance use in the past year and didn’t get it, according to Te Hiringa Mahara | Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. The strain shows up clearest on the phone: the average wait to reach a national mental health telehealth line grew from just over two minutes in 2020/21 to more than ten minutes in 2024/25, and callers to the 1737 Need to Talk line waited over twenty minutes by 2024/25 — long enough that some people trying to make a first contact simply don’t stay on the line.

Demand for mental health support in New Zealand hasn’t slowed

It would be easy to read New Zealand’s mental health statistics as a story about fewer people needing help, because the number of people using specialist services fell for several years running. That reading doesn’t survive contact with the most recent data. Te Hiringa Mahara’s access data summary, published in February 2026, reports that specialist mental health and addiction services supported 183,356 people in 2024/25, up from 177,284 the year before — and that the total number of referrals into those services rose 10% over the same year, a genuine reversal of what had been a shrinking trend, even though referral volume is still below the 414,488 recorded in 2020/21.

Underneath the specialist numbers, the NZ Health Survey 2024/2025 puts a figure on the people never captured by a referral count at all: 10.5% of adults — roughly 456,000 people — say they wanted professional help for a mental health or substance use concern at some point in the past year and did not receive it. That is need that never became a booking, let alone a completed consult, and it sits alongside a primary care workforce that is not exactly spare capacity waiting to absorb more of it — the Royal New Zealand College of GPs’ 2024 workforce survey found 70% of respondents still rated themselves as moderately-to-highly burnt out.

None of this is presented as a crisis narrative — services are, on the Commission’s own account, moving in the right direction on several fronts, including specialist wait times against government targets. But “moving in the right direction” and “keeping pace with demand” are two different claims, and the gap between them is exactly where a first phone call or message can fall through.

Access and Choice is growing — but it still isn’t meeting its own target

A large share of that rising demand is meant to be absorbed by Access and Choice, the primary mental health and addiction support programme rolled out from 2019 to put free, low-barrier counselling and support within reach of general practices and community services, without needing a specialist referral first. On that measure, the programme’s own numbers show real growth: from roughly 180,000 people supported in 2022/23, to roughly 250,000 in 2023/24, to roughly 280,000 in 2024/25.

That trajectory is a genuine expansion of access, not a rounding error — roughly 100,000 more people reached in three years. It is also still running below the programme’s own stated aim of supporting 325,000 people a year, per the same Te Hiringa Mahara summary. A programme can be growing quickly and still be short of the volume the people trying to reach it represent; those are not contradictory facts, and the gap between “~280,000 reached” and “325,000 needed” is a reasonable working estimate of how much more first-contact capacity the system is still trying to build.

The bottleneck isn’t the clinician’s diary — it’s the phone call

This is the part of the picture that a service-delivered count, on its own, cannot show: what happens to the person before they become one of those 183,356 or 280,000. Te Hiringa Mahara’s own data on New Zealand’s national mental health telehealth services gives an unusually direct answer. The number of people who actually got through to those services fell from 88,427 in 2020/21 to 51,816 in 2024/25 — even as the average wait to connect grew from just over two minutes to more than ten minutes over the same period. For the 1737 Need to Talk line specifically, the wait climbed past twenty minutes by 2024/25.

Read those two lines together and the story isn’t that fewer people need telehealth mental health support than they did during the pandemic peak. It’s that fewer of them are managing to stay connected long enough to reach someone, while the ones who do stay wait several times longer than they used to. A rising wait and a falling completion count, moving together, is the signature of a line that has more people trying to reach it than it can pick up — not of cooling demand.

Academic research backs up why this gap opened rather than closed once the initial pandemic-era telehealth expansion passed. A 2024 mixed-methods study in the International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications, based on interviews with 33 clinicians and service utilisation data across three New Zealand regions, found that sustained telehealth use in mental health services depended on organisational factors — leadership, policy support, technical backing and workforce capacity — that were often missing once the emergency footing of 2020 eased. The authors’ conclusion was that with the right governance and institutional support, telehealth could meaningfully help close capacity gaps in mental health services. Without it, the technology exists but the system around it doesn’t reliably carry the load, which is a reasonable description of what the wait-time data above shows happening in practice.

More referrals are being turned away, too

The strain isn’t confined to the first phone call. Te Hiringa Mahara’s data also shows the proportion of declined referrals into specialist mental health and addiction services rising, from 6.7% in 2023/24 to 7.4% in 2024/25 — and referrals coming from GPs were declined at the highest rate of any source, 17.7%. That is a different problem from an unanswered phone line: it’s a referral that was successfully made, reached the specialist service, and was still turned away, usually because it didn’t meet the threshold for that level of care.

It matters here because it changes what “getting through” actually guarantees. Even a person who successfully reaches a service, waits their turn, and is referred on can still end up without a confirmed appointment — which makes the first contact, and whether it’s handled well, more important, not less. A clinic that answers reliably and captures the right information the first time gives that referral its best chance of landing somewhere useful, rather than becoming one more attempt that has to be repeated.

What continuous phone and WhatsApp coverage changes, generically

None of the data above is about clinical capacity in the sense of more counsellors, more psychiatrists, or more publicly funded sessions — that is a workforce and funding question well outside what any single clinic decides, and the RNZCGP burnout figures above suggest it isn’t solved by simply asking existing staff to answer more calls. What a clinic can control is narrower and more concrete: whether the call or message that arrives — at 9am, at 9pm, from someone calling for the first time — gets answered, or gets a busy line and a decision about whether to try again.

That’s the specific problem Arbol is built for. An AI voice and WhatsApp agent that answers a clinic’s intake line and messages immediately, at any hour, captures the caller’s details, and gets them logged into the booking flow doesn’t add psychologists or psychiatrists to New Zealand’s workforce, and it isn’t meant to. It also doesn’t replace 1737 or Healthline as a crisis or support resource — a call that sounds urgent is routed to the appropriate service, the same way a receptionist would triage it, just without a queue in between. What it changes is whether a routine first-contact call — someone asking to book a telehealth consult, confirm an appointment, or find out what a referral pathway looks like — turns into a logged request instead of a missed call nobody follows up on.

None of these steps require new clinical headcount to try — they just make the size of a clinic’s own first-contact gap visible, which is usually the first thing needed before deciding what to do about it. For more on how continuous, always-on contact coverage fits into everyday clinic operations, see the Arbol homepage. The same access-and-intake pattern shows up in general practice too — see how after-hours calls are closing the access gap in New Zealand general practice — and the same dynamic between rising telehealth demand and stretched intake appears in Australia’s telehealth mental health system and in Canada’s telehealth mental health access gap.