AIHW news

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s (AIHW) 19th biennial flagship report card on the health of Australians was launched yesterday by the Hon Mark Butler, Minister for Health and Aged Care.

Australia’s health 2024 brings together multiple data sources to explore how the health of Australians is faring.

The Australia’s health 2024 product suite comprises:

Australia’s health 2024: in brief – provides a summary of the state of health in Australia.

Australia’s health: topic summaries – a collection of over 60 web pages that present key information and statistics on the health of Australians, the health system, and factors that can influence our health (some are updated when new data are available).

Australia’s health 2024: data insights – a collection of 11 in-depth web articles on selected health topics, with a focus on the importance of a strong evidence base for supporting the health of Australians.

The last Australia’s health report was released in mid-2022 when Australia was in the middle of the Omicron wave of the pandemic. Now, in mid-2024, it is a good time to look back over the last few years and consider where we stand.

So, what Australia’s health 2024 tell us about how the nation is faring?

Overall, we are doing well when it comes to our health despite significant impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are still ongoing and future health challenges that remain for us as a nation.

Life expectancy

• Australia has the fourth highest life expectancy among 38 Organisations for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
• A boy and a girl born in 2020–2022 can expect to live on average 81.2 years and 85.3 years respectively – an increase of over 40% since the start of the 20th century.
• For the first time since the mid-1990s, however, life expectancy in Australia decreased in 2020–2022 – by 0.1 years for males and females from 2019–2021 to 2020–2022.

Burden of disease

• As life expectancy has increased over time, so too has the number of years, on average, Australians spend in full health.
• Australians lost an estimated 5.6 million years of healthy life due to either ill-health (54% of total burden) or dying prematurely (46% of the total burden) in 2023. There was, however, an 11% decline in total burden (after adjusting for population ageing) between 2003 and 2023.

Burden of chronic conditions

• Around 3 in 5 Australians lived with at least one long-term health condition, and 2 in 5 live with at least 2, in 2022.
• The number of Australians living with dementia is expected to more than double by 2058 to 849,300 people.
• Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death in Australia although the age-standardised death rate has been declined by 80% between 1980 and 2022 (from 297 to 52 deaths per 100,000 population).
• Cancer is a major cause of illness although the age-standardised cancer mortality rate has decreased by 32% between 1994 and 2023 (213 to 145 deaths per 100,000 population).
• Since the introduction of the National Cervical Screening Program, the age-standardised cervical cancer mortality rate has halved in women aged 25–74 between 1990 and 2021 (5.6 to 2.0 deaths per 100,000 population).

Risk factors

• Fewer Australians are smoking. Daily smoking rates among people aged 14+ more than halved from 24% in 1991 to 8.3% in 2022–23.
• The proportion of people aged 14+ drinking alcohol in ways that put their health at risk has fallen from 39% in 2004 to 31% in 2022–2023.
• More Australians are also physically active. Almost 4 in 10 (37%) adults aged 18–64 did not meet the physical activity guideline in 2022, a decrease from 51% in 2017–18.
• The proportion of adults living with overweight or obesity has increased, from 56% in 1995 to 66% in 2022.
• Vaping is on the rise with daily vaping rates among people aged 14+ increasing from 0.5% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2022–2023. Vaping was most common among young people aged 18–24 (9.3%).

Australia’s health system

• Australia spent an estimated $241.3 billion on health goods and services, an average of $9,365 per person in 2021–22.
• Hospitalisation rates have remained lower than the pre-pandemic level (2018–19) in each year to 2022–23, with the largest falls observed in both 2019–20 and 2021–22, coinciding with elective surgery restrictions and workforce disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Medicare Benefits Schedule-subsidised telehealth attendances have shown no signs of reverting back to pre-pandemic levels of use. In 2023, each Australian, on average, received 1.26 telehealth attendances (a total of 33.7 million attendances) compared with 0.01 telehealth attendances in the pre-pandemic years 2017–2019 (ranging from 176,800 to 275,400 total attendances each year).
• The proportion of people accessing Medicare-subsidised mental health-specific services has increased from 8% in 2013–14 to 10% in 2022–23.
• Fewer (65%) emergency department patients were ‘seen on time’ for their triage category, a decrease from 67% in 2021–22 and from 71% in 2018–19.

Since its first release in 1988, Australia’s health has been an authoritative source of health information for service providers, researchers, policy advisors and the public. Robust, in-depth data plays an important role in supporting better decisions on health policy and service delivery. Congratulations to all AIHW teams involved in this important project.