This ninth national report provides information on 266 organisations funded by the Australian government to deliver health services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These organisations contributed to the 2016–17 Online Services Report. Information is presented on the characteristics of these organisations; the services they provide; client numbers, contacts and episodes of care; staffing levels; and service gaps and challenges.

Some changes were made to the 2016–17 data collection, aimed at ensuring consistency in episode of care reporting between the different data collection systems. This resulted in a decrease in primary health episode of care counts in 2016–17. These are not comparable with previous collections, so comparisons are not presented in this report. See Chapter 2 for more information about the data collection, data quality and the impacts of these changes.