Multimorbidity in Australia
Almost 4 in 10 Australians, 9.7 million people, were living with two or more chronic conditions at once in 2022.
KEY FINDINGS
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tracks multimorbidity, living with two or more chronic conditions at the same time, as a key measure of population health. Drawing on national health survey and administrative data, its analysis looks at how common multimorbidity is, who it affects most, and how it relates to lifestyle risk factors and socioeconomic disadvantage.
An estimated 9.7 million Australians, almost 4 in 10, were living with multimorbidity in 2022. The pattern is strongly age-related: around 11% of Australians aged 0 to 14 were affected, rising to 79% of those aged 85 and over. It is also unevenly distributed, with people in the most disadvantaged areas more likely to be affected than those in the wealthiest, and rates higher outside major cities.
Risk factors compound the picture. Among adults with four or more risk factors, 59% were living with multimorbidity, compared with 29% of those with none, and 60% of adults eating no daily serves of fruit or vegetables were living with multimorbidity. Yet in 2022-23, only 16% of the population accessed multidisciplinary care through a GP chronic disease management plan.
The pattern beneath these numbers is what matters for prevention. Chronic conditions rarely arrive alone, they cluster, and the risk factors driving them are measurable well before any single diagnosis is made. Catching those signals early, across systems rather than one at a time, is exactly what a baseline health screen is built for.
It also lands unevenly. Multimorbidity is more common in the most disadvantaged communities than in the wealthiest, which makes broad, accessible screening not only a clinical question but a question of fairness.
