Veterans of the Australian Defence Force are an important group of people for health and welfare monitoring. This report presents an overview of what is known about the health and welfare of Australian veterans, identifies key data gaps and looks at what could be done to improve the evidence base.

The Family Wellbeing Study focuses on how families are faring at two of the major stages of a military career: during service, and in the first years after the transition to civilian life. An additional focus is how differing types of family members are faring.

A three year partnership between the DVA and AIHW has been established to run from 2017–18 to 2019–20, with the aim of building a comprehensive profile of the health and welfare of Australia’s veteran population.

The veteran-centred model is based on the AIHW’s person-centred model and supports a person-centred approach to understanding the experiences and outcomes of Australia’s veterans. This working paper shows how the AIHW person-centred model can be relevantly applied to the veteran population to support holistic analysis and reporting of veterans’ health and welfare.

This audit found that the majority of DVA rehabilitation and compensation services are being delivered to veterans and their dependents within DVA’s time-based performance targets. However, a minority of claims take an excessively long period to process due to inefficient handling. These delays can have significant impacts for the veterans involved.