This year we are celebrating 20 years since dapaanz called for members at Cutting Edge 2002. We are super proud of how far we have come in those 20 years, of the breadth and diversity of our membership and the services they offer around the country.

For this year’s Cutting Edge, we prepared some snapshots of our membership to share with attendees. We share these below.

Since 2002, dapaanz has guided and supported the continued professionalisation and development of the addiction workforce, so that today tāngata whai ora (people living with addiction challenges) have a wide range of options available to them from a diverse addiction workforce working in a range of settings.

The development of clinical, cultural and lived experience roles and skills, as well as harm reduction and prevention options, has broadened the range of services offered, as well as the population the workforce now serves. This, in turn, has destigmatised receiving support from and working within the addiction sector.

Our ‘support-as-usual’ has grown in breadth and depth since 2002 – moving well beyond a mainly medicalised approach to encompass a wide variety of models, approaches and interventions with a strong psychosocial foundation.

Since 2017, dapaanz registered practitioners are gazetted to provide services under the SACAT and Land Transport Acts – ensuring HPCA equivalency for dapaanz-registered practitioners.

Today, there are almost 900 registered addiction practitioners across the country and more than 200 provisional practitioners.

In the diagram on the right, we can see the number of addiction practitioners per 100,000 population by region.

The population cartogram on the far right is a value-by-area map (areas with higher values increase in size and areas with lower values decrease). Here, the size of each region is proportionate to its census 2018 population. The dapaanz practitioner rate per
100,000 population is represented using colour, with the darkest green being the highest rate and the pinkest colour being the lowest.
For example, the visualisation shows that the practitioner rate in the most populous region (Auckland; 23.0) is just below the national
rate (23.8), while the lowest rate (Tasman; 1.9) impacts a relatively small population.

A map of New Zealand showing locations of all 1772 dapaanz members plotted by postcode (July 2022)
A map and a cartogram side by side showing dapaanz practitioners per regional population

Dapaanz Māori membership

(click on map to see a larger version)

Dapaanz Pasifika membership

A map of New Zealand showing the number of dapaanz Pasifika members by region

(click on map to see a larger version)

Dapaanz Asian membership

(click on map to see a larger version)