The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has produced 2 comprehensive reports on dementia in Australia (in 2007 and 2012) and in 2021 will release a third compendium on this major public health issue. The earlier reports were hampered by a lack of Australian prevalence data and other limitations in health and aged care data for addressing key policy questions about the extent and impacts of dementia on the Australian community and service systems.

This report takes a fresh look at the dementia data landscape in the light of changes in the health and aged care policy and data environments in recent years. It finds that some key data gaps persist—in particular, a lack of data on the diagnosis and management of dementia by general practitioners and other medical specialists—and that the My Aged Care system introduced in 2015 will only begin to deliver this year the data needed to support analysis of older peoples’ assessed care needs.