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People with intellectual disability have some of the worst health outcomes of any group of Australians.
They have a life expectancy 27 years lower than people who don’t have intellectual disability. They find it harder to access preventative care, so they need to go to hospital more often. This is not good for people with intellectual disability or the health system.
Since 2021 Australian governments have worked together to try and improve the health of people with intellectual disability. They are trying to do this through the National Roadmap for Improving the Health of People with Intellectual Disability. The roadmap is a plan about how to make health care better for people with intellectual disability.
In early 2025 the Centre’s Driving Change team looked at efforts so far to improve intellectual disability health.
Some good things have happened, but lots more needs to happen.
Our Driving Change team have produced a report and scorecard about what they found.
What we found
The Commonwealth is supporting some good things:
- support for the National Centre of Excellence in Intellectual Disability Health
- national standards for quality care
- the National Disability Data Asset
- ongoing support for telehealth through Medicare
The states and territories are doing some good things:
- specialised intellectual disability health/mental health services in four states
- disability liaison officers in one state, and
- making more documents in Easy Read, health passports, reasonable adjustments and emergency planning in some states and territories.
The Centre and its consortium members have been supporting these reforms.
More work is very much needed. Many of the pieces of the National Roadmap are moving too slowly or have not been started.
People with intellectual disability report:
- bad experiences in health settings
- too many visits to public hospital emergency departments
- bad events occurring during health care
- little attention to improving experiences for First Nations people with intellectual disability and people with intellectual disability from diverse backgrounds
- poor communication and low levels of understanding of intellectual disability health among health care providers
- funding that does not support quality care for people with intellectual disability.
The Disability Royal Commission (DRC) said that more work was needed. The DRC found that there was ongoing neglect of people with intellectual and cognitive disability in the Australian health system.
We need to keep making progress. The Centre wants the next federal government in Australia to:
- Commit to continued implementation of the National Roadmap
- Invest in primary care for people with intellectual disability
- Implement the Intellectual Disability Health Capability Framework
- Include people with intellectual disability in the National Health Reform Agreement
You can read more details in the full report and scorecard.
More work is needed to make sure the health of people with intellectual disability in Australia is better. The Centre wants the government to know this is very important.
